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Monthly Archives: October 2016

Tom’s dad had pulled the car over to the side of the road because Tom’s feet had started kicking against the backs of the front seats.

Tom heard the weird noises coming out of his mouth but they were some way away. He was too busy sitting in the deafening shock to pay too much attention to the weirdness his body was coming up with. Madness had come out of Tom’s mum’s mouth.

His dad had seemed a bit thrown himself about the revelation which in itself took Tom to a whole new level of freaking out – as if the first level wasn’t bad enough.

Tom was currently experiencing what he had previously only imagined, though in fairly great detail it must be said.

His spy/stuntman persona had on a couple of occasions previously become involved in plots that reached beyond the usual trapped in the underwater bunker forward slash laser torture forward slash fast filling air tight chamber forward slash fall from very high rocket fuel silo dot com. But this was a whole new level.

Tom had charted an emotional response matrix that he could draw on – a sort of Def Con 1 2 3 4 and 5 with 4 and 5 delivering the more complicated Luke/Darth I am your father type show stopping revelation

But to be fair that was movies; and what his mum thought she was doing swinging this bag of madness at him was beyond him currently.

One part of Tom had come over all Morgan Freeman for a moment – really chilled out and circumspect about everything. Doing the God thing. But that suddenly seemed a little over the top given the slightly biblical nature of what he’d unleashed.

It was the other part of him though that was making all the noise; doing all the heavy lifting and having the noisy and openly expressed nightmare.

The blood was pumping through his head so loudly that he felt like he was living inside an espresso machine.

Tom had thought his ‘mum’ was mental at first, like properly ‘lost her marbles, call an ambulance’ mental. So he decided to go into laugh hysterically in a rising pitch mode

Then the small tear cutting a tiny valley through her foundation told him that perhaps she wasn’t mental. Or funny. Tom had never seen pain in someone’s eyes before. He had read it in a book.

There’s tons of it in his mum’s eyes now. And fear – like she was being stalked by something.

His freak-out had eventually subsided, closing out with a bit of glass half full as his father calls it. In kicking the rear of the seat so hard that it suddenly jerked forward on its runners, Tom inadvertently revealed a Lego character he had thought lost or stolen by his sister.

Note to self: apologise to Jaqui for trashing her troll collection in revenge.

Jaqui.

Careful what you wish for. All those spiteful rows. ‘I wish you weren’t my sister/brother. I hate you’. Would she be pleased? Dunno. That she might be made Tom suddenly terribly sad and also a little claustrophobic.

They continued to sit, parked weirdly at 40 degrees of the side of the road, All three of them, stock still, staring out into the field beyond the corrugated warehouse next to the roundabout.

After an hour a rather disembodied voice had appeared in the car. It was Tom’s. Slightly spooky as he wasn’t aware of either his mind or his mouth moving.

“I want to go to Bea’s now”.

Note to self: ‘What do I call her? Can’t call her mum!’

He didn’t mean to be nasty about it or hurtful. He just felt knackered all of a sudden. Very, very tired.

Extraordinary was exhausting business. No wonder Superman got pasted in the end.

They drove off, radio on, more news of the effects of Tom’s extraordinariness pouring into the middle of the car unnoticed by all three of them.

Shazam. Suddenly Tom is standing in Bea’s doorway. He steps forwards and draws the door up behind him. Tom feels sick. His legs feel funny. Jelly. Jelly legs. Tom has jelly legs and a bomb for a heart that had just blown up. He looks at Bea and everything and nothing makes sense.

Who are you?

You lied to me?

Who do I look like?

You look fat

Lots of things hurtle through Tom’s mind. The last one just popped up out of nowhere. She doesn’t look fat. It was a spiteful flash. A moment of hurtfulness. See how you like it

Is Tom happy? Yes. Painfully.

Truthfully? Yes.

Does he love his mum? Yes.

Is Mum his mother? No.

Is Aunt Bea his mother? Yes. He thinks.

Is this all a joke. Yes. And No.

Does he love her? Yes. And no.

Does he trust her? No. Don’t know.

Does he believe in her? Yes.

Is he ashamed? Too bloody right.

Does it matter? No.

Jaqui isn’t his sister. Now he wishes she was.

Will Kathy like Bea? Yes.

Does he want Kathy? Not really.

Why did she dump him? Who knows?

Does he care? Yes. But he wasn’t really going out with her so…

Who’s his father if it’s not Dad? Ask Bea?

Is she crying? Yes.

Is everything all right? Don’t know?

Is that Bea’s favourite song playing on the radio? Yes.

Does it make him cry? Yes.

Should it? No. But he is crying too.

Their unspoken ‘yes’s and ‘no’s’ and ‘I don’t know why’s’ ping between them and the music in her ears and the feeling in his heart fill the space between them. As Tom and Bea stand in the cat’s cradle of their lives, twelve years of ‘why’ sitting in the middle of the Kitchen between them.

The doorbell rings.

Duh. Brilliant. Mum. (Or the woman known as Mum who is in fact his Aunt if the lunatics are to be believed.) Always forgets something. So rubbish like that. Tom harrumphs. Surly face. Snorts. Shifts slightly. And shakes one arm out. Shakes his sleeve down. It won’t go down. Half way up his arm. Loser.

He looks at Bea’s face. Nope. Not Mum. And a weird expression. Something moves behind her eyes. Who then. And the air changes colour.

Where’s she looking. At the floor? No, the door. The bottom of the door. Yes. Blimey. Never noticed that before. The door was old: cottage old. The number of times the wooden panels has been sanded and repainted could be measured in generations. The whole door bowed outward in the middle and to be fair resembled a rhombus more than a rectangle.

The light from the hallway spills in under the door. A flush of light, broken in two places. Toms life was starting to resemble the intro to one of John’s Zombie games. Creepier still was the fact that Bea never leaves the hall light on. Apart from Christmas when she was expecting a random set of visitors from the pub.

Tom reaches around and pulls at the door. The door is stiff. He can feel the tension run up from his arm into his neck. This is because contrary to the twist in his body, his eyes are still locked firmly on Bea.

Facebook.

Michael supposed that he knew it would come somehow. He was just a little surprised at the how.

He wasn’t a great one for the modern world of devices and screens. They seemed to suck the life out of people, purposeless vacuums that sucked everyone that used them into some feeling-less void of otherness.

Facebook. He understood the principle of it. That was simple enough. But it was the fetish of it, the addiction of it that surprised him.

He had against his better nature gone on line – the IT room at the school was ‘very good’ and the headmaster had always said, ‘please use it, just be respectful’. So, in a fit of modernity, Michael had gone into the musty room of electrified dust and exposed wires one day in the Easter break and ‘logged on’ or ‘in’ or whatever it was.

The small card with the passcode had been handed to him like some precious jewel, almost begrudgingly, as if this were the portal to a precious world that the likes of him wouldn’t know what to do with. Or perhaps they just didn’t trust lonely men with no seeming life who lived at the edge of society, thinking all manner of ills of him and what they might do with a passcode.

The process had been straightforward enough. Though he wondered how people found time to fill these screens with so much stuff. And all so personal. Like some permanent photo shoot – pictures of food, a foot in new shoes, smiling babies, another we’re at a party outside a club look at us doing stuff.

Was nothing hidden anymore? Was there no mystery? Or perhaps Michael just had lived inside so many mysteries and secrets that it had coloured his mind against anyone living an open-hearted life.

None the less, this still looked as if people vomited up their lives onto every screen and to every person they could.

Social bulimia. Millions of people bingeing on every experience they could, voraciously, ferociously, filled to bursting, a tsunami of immediate gratification, look at me look at me.

That was a lot of narcissism to consume. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps the social vomiting had to happen. Perhaps that was the saving grace. That to remain a vaguely functioning empathetic human being, you had to purge the toxic bolus of narcissism from you, lest it choke you.

Perhaps that was it – millions of people, incapable of keeping it inside, processing it, would bring it up, spraying it into every screen and onto every network they could. But sadly only to find the need to binge again, locked in the cycle of binge urge binge purge.

Michael had grown quietly used to tapping in. He had searched a few old regimental friends on it. A few had popped up. And he friended the regiments facebook page. Never engaged with it. Just observed from the musty room at the far side of the school.

Saw their kids and grandkids. Their holidays. The astonishingly normal lives posted by their wives and girlfriends.

How did they remain so unscathed buy what they did?

And Michael came to the conclusion that the more unscathed you were on the way in, perhaps the more unscathed you came out. Not much of a theory but it suited him.

Which is why when the world turned Michael wasn’t surprised. It made things make sense. It made Bea’s decision make sense. She wasn’t a coward. She was just waiting. Her irrepressible faith in the fact that the day would come, travelling through time, wholly intact. She went in with her belief unscathed. Even in all the turbulence. And the awfulness. Untarnished. Unsoiled.

But Michael was a believer now.

Prrp prrp

It had finally rung. His archaic Nokia 95. With its old school ring. Someone in the caff had told him he was fashionable again. Whatever. Christ. He’d even started using their slang.

It was a perfectly good phone though. Michael didn’t need Gigs of memory, the interweb, swipy interfaces or 4G. He certainly didn’t need a state of the art camera. What was that all about. If he was filling up his facebook pages with endless stuff perhaps. But no. Michaels photographic exhibition would probably concentrate on perfectly compressed tea bags and cracked lino.

He knew the phone was going to ring at some point. Not as a premonition. God no. Mysticism and spirituality were a luxury Michael had never riches enough to afford.

His facebook page had warned him. One day there was a message. Threw him rather. Boatboy7. Christ. He’d made it his facebook name. The Boatboy. But not so much the boy now. The really startling part was as he scanned the page the word Bear leapt out at him like a hammer fist. No-one ever called him Bear. Only precious Bea.

‘The world is turning Bear. Upside down inside out. Its turning and its time.’

The Boatboy had asked him for Bea’s address. He didn’t have it to give. But he was sure that he could find out somehow. The interaction was sparse, formal; but there was a gentleness in it. No, kindness. Kindness was a better way to describe it. Both men had tired of the alternatives and seemed happy to embrace a gentler demeanour in the world.

The earth had only ever moved once for Doug. Just once. Instantly and irrevocably. After the concert, he and Bea had snaked their way back to a room, the jumping sweat inside their clothes, in a hostel, secret as mice.

The small room bought with it a rush of fear in Doug. The room was just large enough for a single bed and a ply wardrobe, a wardrobe he sensed was about two joiner plugs short of full house, its top sloping a few degrees further to the right than its bottom.

On the chair to the side of the single bed there was a small temple to the world she came from. The hold-all bag looked expensive: knackered and well-travelled but expensive. This was no LV knock off from the local market. The small white earphones were top class. And the purse in faded milky green hide with a clasp and pink innards was neither cheap nor every-day.

Perhaps that was the source of the fear – while they were outside it didn’t matter, where she came from and who she was to others – she was without context, without past or present or family or friends – just the bare-foot girl with the green glow eyes and an attitude that reached into his middle and grabbed a handful of everything.

But in these clues lay a large screaming sign – he was out of his depth – he was treading water in a great big sea of her – and he was way out of his depth. As a small delicately fingered hand reached out and touched his neck tracing upwards to his face the trance like state of quiet fear popped, his cheek suddenly twitching, the affection in her touch hitting him like a cattle prod.

Some boys crave affection without ever knowing what it actually is – what actions and intentions form and shape it. Some learn to forget what affection feels like, the world prescribing that they jettison it on their journey to manhood. Some never know it at all, and others spend their years in terror of some perceived magical and dark natured power hosted within it – one with which they will be manipulated and coerced.

Doug simply collapsed – the valve popped open on his sea-soaked bouncy castle of a coping mechanism.

Suddenly he was swimming in the sea of her – shape and form lost their bearings and his compass of what was real and what was imagined left him – everything suddenly passing into rolling abstracts just beyond his field of focus.

They had agreed just one thing as the mist broke the following morning, the boy from the boats and the extraordinary bare foot girl (well, the bare foot girl had anyway).

In the months following he had pursued her, even after having promised he wouldn’t – because something inside pulled him towards her. The man, Michael, or Bear as she called him, had been sent to meet Doug.

He had passed on Bea’s words to Doug. Now was not the time: but that the time would come when the earth would turn, move again. When hope carried a flag and the shame was gone. And this time it would be amazing, extraordinary and revealing. And hope would free them both. He just had to be patient. Well he had been patient. Especially given that Doug had sensed that there was something beautiful about that night together. He just never realised that the beauty had a name: this sharp, funny awkward boy who fell to great heights; who dreams that the world will turn if we really wish it; and that our hearts are built only for beginnings.

Funny how you only need to move one small thing and you can change the world – and the people in it. Sometimes to go beyond dotting an ‘I’ and crossing a ‘T’ and you can do great things. Take the ‘I’ and move it two places to the left and Untied becomes United. Funny.

And the world turns and three people collide in the middle of a kitchen in a cottage by an AGA – a tinny radio ringing in the background.

Tom looks at the weatherworn man with the saline squint standing in Bea’s doorway. There’s something about him the makes the feeling in Tom’s middle flare and pop.

The finches scuttle through branches and fence posts. Sunlight dances across the scabs of peeling Plane tree bark. The American Collared Dove swoops from the roses to the beech, chortling to itself as it does so.

The un-ironed man looks out across his garden. His chair now sits under the open sky, no branches or vantage points above him from which small pungent criticisms can be dropped on his head.

The peaty soil has presented a beautiful thatched green lawn this year, stretching down on a slow slope to the babbling brook just out of sight. Sparks of fractured light splinter through the willow.

The sun is in the east now: it was the west but things have taken a turn for the worst recently: though he seems to be the only one to think so.

Satellite pictures paraded on the BBC had shown how England having turned on its Black Country axis as it approached the west coast of Norway wheeling around and then forging south.

Such betrayal.

The mid-Atlantic swell from the Americas now buffers the not so East Anglian coast. And suddenly everyone was OK with it: OK? What could possibly be OK with this dreadful human burlesque.

Typical, the man thought. No one has any allegiance any more. They’d turn on a sixpence if it benefited them. No wonder the country was going, or should he say floating, to the dogs.

Once people would have listened to Peter Davis, but not any more John-O-Groats is the new Penzance. God help us. The garden now facing due West had put paid to any triumphant Azalea growth in what was the most splendid corner of the garden.

He looks to the far end of the garden where two full-blown arboreal Rhododendron squat on their boughs. The long shadows of the two girls who once ran laughing around the young arboria are long gone, though the memory of them is sharp and clear. Those summer shadows would doubtless fall in different directions now to the ones imprinted on the sun-burned celluloid of his memory.

Death comes slowly as a rule, the light strangled out of the beautiful and the living in the end. Parts of the garden once bathed in beautiful light now lie damp, flat and shadow-less. The Nilotic tribes of Africa believed that to lose your shadow was a portent of death. And those people and things that robbed you of it were themselves evil.

Then again, if you were mad enough to be standing in the middle of the desert at Noon you would indeed lose your shadow, the sun directly above you. You would also lose your mind and soon after that, your life. Mad Dogs and Englishmen indeed.

The whole isle is slipping through its own wake at a gentle 16 knots now. The gulf-stream laps at craggy Pictish granite cliffs, the shadow dwellers tucked into their folds and wrinkles now startled by the brash, warm southern sun. The idea beggars belief. To the Indies – south towards the Wind-rush islands.

Bea’s words echo in his ears, the picture of her face as she said them clear in his mind. Careful what you wish for Daddy. He wonders how they are doing. The girls. Viv’s children or child to be precise must be quite grown up now. And Bea, his beautiful Beatrice: what of her? And that baby boy. What Viv had thought she was doing was beyond Peter.

He wondered whether Bea had made anything of her life. He wondered what had become of ‘that’ boy; the boat boy. So different both of them, in so many ways, and so tightly bound together in others: both polar points of his own compass.

His once-new-wife clatters crockery in the kitchen at the farthest point across the garden from where he sits. She still seemed to find quiet pleasure in cracking his first wife’s crockery – an act of joyous splintering passive aggression: though she was now down to three plates, two side plates, one serving dish and a soup terrine so a little economy would need to be applied in the therapeutic breakage area. Only a few to go but not a bad effort from a 60-piece set.

It had taken them sometime to rediscover some equilibrium after the tumult and the conflict of ‘The Great Divide’. She patently held him responsible. It was all ‘just ghastly Peter, the whole thing. I hope that you’re bloody well happy now. You’ve got what you wanted. Great. We certainly got rid of the fucking foreigners haven’t we. Won’t be getting any cheese eating surrender monkeys despoiling our precious shores now and telling us what to do. And we’re a lot closer to those bloody rib chewing soda slurping goddammit special friends of yours and their dreadful bloody chino shorts than we’ve ever been before.

The conversation had rolled on it that manner for a few weeks punctuated by some rather exceptional sugar bowl lobbing. There was even an incident involving his socks that didn’t bear repeating. She was not the most creative of people but her vengeances were sublime in their planning and execution.

Eventually they had wheezed their way into a comfortable stupour of routine again. The odd flare up but nothing too serious.

To potter through a life untouched by fierce emotions was quite an acceptable destination for all involved really. Well, for Peter anyway.

The fire had gone out of Peter Davis long ago.

The destination he sought was comfortable and without schism and fracture – irritatingly it was also a destination that echoed with the absence of the two things Peter held most dear.

In some ways he was glad that events had conspired to bring Viv and Bea together against him.

In a strange way it made him feel secure in the knowledge that when he wasn’t there any more at least they would still have each other, bound together, unlikely to drift apart and desert each other’s hearts, as so many people do.

He turns in his chair, the striped canvas creaking at the tilt of his weight. He raises the large heavy-based blue-green glass jug of lemonade. He pours the lemonade into the tumbler. His finger runs a drip of lemonade back up towards the glass’s rim.

He smoothes the rucked material in his trousers down towards the knee, then pitches one foot up and over the smoothed knee to descend into the snug of crossing.

The radio in the kitchen tips tinny music across the lawn towards him. It’s an old tune; one he particularly liked once upon a time – an anthem of ‘happy’ repatriation to be sung with ironic joy by every one of them as they left the sceptered isle, never to return.

Music took you backwards at such a speed as to make your nose bleed and your head spin. Though some, as Peter now realised, took you forwards. Even when that was the last place you wished to go.

And then something quite particular happened. A small ripple ran along the rutted lips on the old man’s face. His eyes pictured a bare-foot girl dancing around a garden.

A long invisible piece of rope that had hung slung slack for so many years had tightened recently – noticeably and with purpose – and now the overwound fibres that ran between where Peter sat and the not so distant and confused young heart of a young man standing next to an Aga had started to do something remarkable: they had started to hum. Something twitched at the corner of Peter’s mouth. A smile.

Extraordinary.

Miraculous snacks.

Michael’s booted feet scuff through the last vestige of swept leaves gathered in a pile by the fence. (The rest had been dispatched either by buffeting breezes or bored trainers within ten minutes of Michael gathering them.)The sun has arched high across the school and is currently bathing the once dim and dank far corner of the playground in front of him where one of the pre-fabs abuts the fence in a brilliant warmth.

The mesh fence dividing the sprawling mercurial mess of pupils from the outside world turns up in various places along where it meets the ground, pushed up either by unknowing nocturnal creatures trying to get in or the feral kind trying to get out.

Michael’s long handled litter prod seeks out random detritus amongst the longer grass sprouting around the bottom of the fence; forensically tipping and scratching at the underbelly of various chocolate and sweet wrappers, crisp packets, pizza flyers, condoms, cigarette packets and stubs and the scatter of DS game card boxes, patently procured at some point in the recent past via light criminality.

One wrapper catches his eye. Years of training had honed his ability to identify even one micron of difference in the landscape confronting him – one shred of vegetation disturbed, one stone on a path displaced, one leaf on a bush disfigured, one door curiously shut, one window curiously ajar.

There was something about this luminous red green and blue wrapper that drew his eye – something of its madness that attracted him. He leaned in, the muscles across his back flexing and then tightening like a strap run up from his hip to his neck to secure the teetering tension just so.

The words on the wrapper were a little scratched and buffeted now – the luminescent ink fading slightly in patches here and there. The language was foreign he knew that, the topography of the words and the horizons of the sentences clearly different to the Anglo Saxon shapes and metre.

BraCao Ping. Bloody silly name.

Michael leaned in a little more towards the dark hollow where the wrapper sat, partially buried. He fixed his position again, a hand running down the side of his outer thigh, reassuring the bunched muscles that they should hold fast for a little longer.Strange world. Strange matters.

He would have once wondered how this sun-starched, sea-salted foreign wrapper from a foreign land fringing the Atlantic Ocean had come to be buried in this dank little playground corner of a playing field on the east coast of England facing the North Sea. But this dank little corner was now newly bathed by a sun it had until recently never seen before or even knew existed.

The shadows had changed and its north had become south and its east had become west. Now the traveller and the host had become one and the same in this transient existence: simultaneously capable of receiving new travelers while travelling oneself.

If geographic alignment, the latitudes and longitudes of bearing defined your sense of self then they had all become, by his reckoning at least, a foreign land and foreign people to themselves.

Indeed it was the wrapper that had travelled but a short way compared to them.To travel far while stationary was indeed a conjuror’s trick – but one that would open doors of perception and determination that would prove overwhelming, confusing and liberating all at once.

Michael was reminded briefly of a story he was once told; of an old woman who, even though she had lived in the same west country village for the ninety three years, two months and twenty days of her life, and had as a matter of certifiable fact never strayed more than 400 yards from the bed in which she was born and in which she also drew her last breath, an old woman who held more worldly wisdom within her; a more expansive understanding of the human condition and greater insight into the universal truths and machinations of our mortal existence than any diplomat, explorer, ambassador, adventurer or trader ever encountered.

So in their new mobile life; this land locked caravanserai, going nowhere had finally become windswept and interesting. Standing still was now rewarded with a new GPS location reading every second.

Michael looked at the wrapper one last time and then up and out across the playing field with its alien shadows and pools of light.As he did an extract from an old poem came to mind: one of the Old Man’s favourites, and it had taken on a rather unexpected twist.

“…That there’s some corner of a foreign field. That is for ever England.”

Uh, wait. Is the mission that I’m being led by the same as the Mission that sits on the wall next to the Vision in the terribly deconstructed boardroom that’s really a lounge pretending not to be a boardroom with beanbags?

Well, no.

Oh now you’re interested. Now you’ve got something to say. You could be a little more helpful.

Mission & Vision are classic strategic constructs that have been in use since mmmm ooooh Porter said them…or updated them at least.

OK. Good. So Mission & Vision – yup got those – wearing the T Shirt – and have checked into my HBR definitions reference library of Death by A. (P.S. That’s an anagram for Anagrams.)

No its not.

OK an abbreviation then. Jeez. Right, where were we?

The Question is: when you say mission led are you referring to the universal mission on the wall… be the world’s greatest chicken frier… relentlessly making good high quality stuff kind of Mission?

I think so.

OK that’s not what Mission-Led is defined as. If you can call it a definition.

Bloody hell. What is it then?

A very specific kind of business: somewhat like a social enterprise but not, and not necessarily charitable. With social impact as one of its primary goals.

Got IT! Heh heh heh. Of COURSE I meant socially impactful mission led. Cuh, Would I be anything else? What do you take me for?

Really?

Yes really.

I thought you were a Purpose Driven business.

Nope.

Yes you were?

No I wasn’t. You’re getting me confused with someone else. I was a Values Led Business for quite a few months about 7 years ago.

Right.

I’m a mission led (social impact) purpose driven visionary business.

Purpose driven.

Yes.

Not purposeful?

Nope.

Right.

What’s the difference?

Apart from the Noun Adjective thing?

Throw me a bone.

Some believe that to simply have Purpose is inert. To be a purposeful business means that you pursue things with a relentless intention. So perhaps purposeful is a better thing to be for a company.

Right smarty pants hair splitter. So why don’t I just say that I am purposely mission-led? Mmmn?

Whatever you want to be.

Blimey. I’m tired. I know. What we need are some VALUES to crack under that mission led purpose purposeful thing. Things that we purposely apply in the world.

Are you asleep?

Almost.

Ok one more question, before I turn myself and my business into an UBER shaking GOOGLE destroying profit machine…with social impact…is it better to be driven or led?

He and his mum once drove down to the shops and, right outside the main doors of the supermarket, his mum reversed into Kathy’s mum’s car. She was talking too much and not paying attention. That was a bit crap.

But then she drove off without getting out or saying anything which made Tom so ashamed he felt sick and had a cold tingly feeling all the way up his back and behind his ears for at least an hour.

They are in the last stretch leading up to his auntie’s village but the traffic is bad for some reason. Tom wonders whether the traffic jam is another by product of the untie-ing. Tom likes the idea of the traffic jam being caused maybe by a farmer driving his cattle down to the sea to drown them in a fit of ‘end of the world’ madness.

Or maybe there is a huge exodus of people from the area, trying to randomly decipher which bit of coast will end up being the desirable bit before the island even comes to a halt. A mass of them making furious spurious calculations and frantic Google searching, all with a mind to property purchasing.

One effect of the shift was that the weather had turned; literally. Parts of the UK experiencing weather like never before. The gentle rolling hills and beaches of South Devon had never had to face off an North Westerly marauding across the North Sea – and the trees, creatures, wave tops and locals looked all the more surprised for it.

For a while it was chillier in the morning and the days were losing light with almost Nordic efficiency. That was, until we turned left again. rolled around and started heading south again.

Nonetheless, everyone agreed, ‘the sunsets had improved immeasurably’ so said Charlie whatsherface from her lovely, lovely garden on the television at least.

Who knew where they would end up. He knew. No. Tom didn’t know: though he thought that maybe the world would expect him to know, given that he’d untied the country in the first place. As they round the bend on the dual carriage way at an unimpressive 23 miles an hour Tom feels a little disappointed. There are no cattle flailing wildly down the hard shoulder pursued by a foaming-mouthed farmer; just more cars.

There was surprisingly little hysteria to be found anywhere. In fact, you could hardly believe that there was anything unusual going on at all sometimes bar the odd confused goose trying to migrate somethingwards and some unexpectedly long boat trips.

Many had reacted in a very British ‘ah well, best make the most of it, eh! Is that rain I felt just; best get a brolly’ kind of way. Except Kathy of course.

(Careful what you wish for.)

Earlier in the day, Tom had been practicing rolling his hips – part of a ‘walk like a cool bloke’ thing he was trying out – as he walked from Science to Double Maths.

The journey took him around Block 1 (Powder Green & Summer Blue plastic panels set into cream painted steel frames hung in concrete with cantilever windows) towards the back of the school, scuffing over the drive, the grass verge and past the edge of the canteen.

As always Tom had been toeing and kicking the odd item as he went, including a strange ball of material at the kerb.

Luckily for Tom it turned out to be a girl in 4c’s pencil case, edged in purple fur, the name of a band he could not read scratched all over it.

‘Luckily’ because the girl’s boyfriend delayed Tom a short while. The pause was due to the boyfriend gently convincing him to pick up the stuff that he had kicked halfway across the tarmac by applying a small amount of pressure through his knee to the small of Tom’s back while pulling Tom’s chin upwards at the same time.

Task completed and Tom was back on his way. Scuffed but mobile again.

The short delay meant that he walked straight into Kathy as she walks around the side of the canteen.

It had taken Tom five minutes to pick up all of the scattered items. These included: pencils (two HB’s sharpened to half their length, 1 B, 2 3B’s and one 2H heavily chewed – an artist!), pens (three biros, one rainbow multi-head pen and two felt tips), an assortment of pencil top rubber animals shaped like fruit, a tampon and one slightly bent cigarette, partially smoked- five minutes that made the difference between Tom missing Kathy entirely and him bumping into her.

Tom was aware that the front of his trousers were slightly damp from the grass verge he’d been held down on and that a rogue piece of chewy has stuck itself to his crotch like a bright white blobby button. Unlike the old days, Tom did not really care.

Tom smiles at Kathy. The fiery ring in her eyes is especially bright today though he senses that she is a little nervous.

“So looks like we’re all going to drown in the middle of the Atlantic then.”

Tom wasn’t sure why he blurted this. Gallows humour Rob Hughes had called it in Biology class. Rob also said that girls find it enormously attractive.

Kathy bursts into tears.

Tom desperately wants to embrace Kathy in her moment of need. A Feeling shifts inside him, stretched the length of his body now; he feels like he is buzzing as if cloaked in some sort of laser field.

Tom is frozen, stuck; can’t move.

Kathy is inches from his body. Must do something, must do something. Tom reaches out and takes Kathy’s arms, currently unemployed down by her sides, dangling in rhythm to the sobs being transported down her shoulders from the top of her neck.

The feeling inside him turns and warps, has a bright flash and then coils like a rope through his arms and into Kathy’s.

Tom feels nervous. This is it. All he ever wanted was to be extraordinary, just once. Just once to be written about in a book; to hear the newscaster say his name on the news using a very particular intonation; to make Nigel’s mother look at him the way she looks at Sports-car Roger.

If he was extraordinary the girl at Mr. Sharpa’s would want to hang with him, even though he didn’t really fancy her. If he was extraordinary, his stealing would become a small forgettable example of a colourful highwayman past – and West would nod and say ‘nice one’.

If he was extraordinary, boys in trainers more expensive than their houses would know who he was and Kathy would think the world of him: he would become her hero, smiling, the bloke in the movie of her mind; the supreme stuntman who fell to heaven; the man who set everyone free.

But him being all of those things to her relied on Kathy being extraordinary enough to understand all of this – which it seems she is not. Well, Bollocks to extraordinary thinks Tom. The warm pebbles tumble about in his trousers. She falls forwards and hits him like a wave over rocks.

He sees her as if for the first time. And his lips choose to start doing things that the words he is not brave enough to say would do otherwise.

They kiss. But this time he’s ready.

His tongue pops out mimicking how she had kissed him last time. Small problem is, hers stays firmly in place. Kathy recoils. Her eyes seem to hurt. Why do they hurt. Shouldn’t they be kissing? Kathy retreats. A step back. Tom shrugs. Why does he shrug. He isn’t shrugging inside. She looks at the floor and back to him. Her head does a half shake. Then she is gone.

Tom is now firmly moulded into the lower part of the car seat. His mind is so full of the memory of Kathy that he does not notice the tyre screech. He does however notice the bang; and the groan of metal twisting, the distant (and quite pretty) tinkling of shattering glass and the blue car immediately in front of them rising and then falling ever so slightly.

He notices that his eyesight wobbles. He also notices that his head hits the windscreen first before dropping to plant his lip on the dashboard where it promptly splits in a way that is a bit slow motion and probably like a movie.

He notices that he slumps back (not unusual) and to the left hand side (quite specific).

Genius. 22 miles an hour on a straight road in a traffic jam and they have an accident. On today of all days, when he’s late to see Bea, who’s the only one who’ll get it, because the country’s sailing off into the wild blue yonder, and he made it happen, and he can’t tell Kathy, because she’s scared and it’ll be his fault; he’ll be a freak, and she won’t like him, but he’s not sure that he cares any more, and his lip’s bleeding, and it really hurts; and he’s fallen out of the car door now, which has opened somehow, and his face is lying against the tarmac, which is quite cool and comfy, bar one piece of grit, and now he’s standing, and his mum’s crying, and a nice man is sitting him on a low wall by the side of the road, because they’re right next to a warehouse forecourt on an industrial estate by the dual carriageway, and he feels a little sick, and falls backwards, which hurts even more because the wall is higher on the other side than it is on his side, and he smacks his head. And his trousers have pulled down slightly showing his bum. Double Whammy. Double Cheeseburger. Shit.

Chapter 20.

Bea hears the scrunch of car tyres on the gravel. She is pleased. Viv had called from Out Patients. Tom’s lip was stitched and his head bruised but he was OK. It ‘rattled his ears but not much more’ and given that Viv thought he needed his head read anyway it wasn’t such a bad thing.

It was dark outside. The fat, warm evening had wafted off towards southern (well western-ish) climes leaving a slightly damp, English summer evening. Bea loves dusk now, and bright sunny days; because all of the shadows are in the wrong place. Chuck out your sundial: though if this carries on like this she may have to move her bedroom across the house and the sitting room vice versa. The world feels different and that’s a beautiful thing. And everyone seems to be pulling together to enjoy it, the United state Of We.

Bar the odd riot and outpouring of regional madness (Kent has threatened to move lock, stock and smoking barrels to wherever the South East ends up being, as a matter of principal – being Kentish is obviously only the half of it – a sense of belonging seemingly only verified by its being inextricably rooted in the ‘south east’, wherever that might end up being physically.

This currently looks like being somewhere just north or south of Ullapool.

Having got some whiff of this the Ullapoolians, not keen on the rest of Scotland at the best of times let alone the auld enemy, have been building barricades for the last week or so and have called each other to arms; well, just pints for the minute but arms if needs must.

Bea finds that she is standing in the middle of the kitchen her eyes playing across the Aga and the radio. It seems as if she has stood there for all of the twelve years that have passed. The door creaks open, the small rasp of its bottom against the one upturned floor tile putting a full stop to its opening.

Tom stands in the door. His eyes are bright and wild, like his father’s. She’s told him, thinks Bea. A road accident followed by a life-changing piece of news about whom you really are.

Who needs celebrity BB on rails!

Her sister had never really been very good with sensitive moments – those moments where the outcome where the consequence of life hangs in the balance, with the slightest tweak one way or nudge the other could have cataclysmic effect.

Bea and Viv had agreed that if the moment presents itself, then they shouldn’t hold back – and it seems that the moment had arisen.

The occasion had presented itself at the hospital while Tom was being checked by a nurse. Viv said that she had been fussing around him, teasing him with ‘mum-kiss-it-better’. She said that Tom had reacted badly. The nurse was quite young and quite pretty.

She thought that her fussing around him had made him all self-conscious and he’d barked at her:

“God mum… just leave it!”

She had moved to cuddle him but apparently Tom had pushed her away.

Viv had said that wasn’t surprised: she knew that she wasn’t the most demonstrative of people. And even though she had some sense that the boy standing in front of her had something to do with this extraordinary journey they had all begun, and that perhaps he was quite confused inside, she wasn’t expecting what was to pour out of him

Tom had suddenly puked his heart into the room said Viv. Her voice had audibly trembled as she repeated the phrases. Truth like bullets.

“Why do you have to be so…”

He stumbles for the words. He slips from the trolley bed. He reels across the room. Viv realizes that it is not the right time to mention his hospital robe is untied at the back.

“20 miles an hour mum. I mean blimey.”

Viv watches him closely. She doesn’t really hear the hurtfulness of his words. She is too busy seeing the twitches and tics as he tries to form his feelings into something close to comprehendible and more importantly communicable. It’s is as if he is possessed by a million thoughts all trying to pop out of his skin at once. His eye is twitching badly and he is having trouble shaping words. He starts to speak and then turns and shrugs of the sentence he starts and then tries again.

He realizes that speaking at her directly is the problem. So Tom turns half towards the wall of the room and speaks as if to an invisible self

“Why can’t I have a mum who doesnt crash a car in a traffic jam… a mum who isn’t so… … who doesn’t …doesn’t…”

He gestures off handedly to where her feet are firmly planted (and shoed) on the cracked vinyl floor.

(Careful Tom. Some things can’t be unsaid. Careful what you wish for.)

Tom had apparently circled around the little room, his bottom peeking through the untied gown. And had then just stopped. Viv said that it seemed like he sensed something, all of a sudden. Stopped in his tracks.

Bea looks at the boy.

Does she love him? Really. How could she have given him away so easily? Was that because she loved him so much she knew it would be easier?

Why was Viv in a position to be a young single mother and not her? Precious windswept Bea. Once you got beyond the romance of it all, it was a bit shit really. She remembered Bear’s face when she had told him about Doug and what she needed him to go and tell the boat boy with oceans for eyes.

She could see that Bear was disappointed in her. And that was unbearable. Not because she had fallen pregnant. Not because of the young man she’d chosen to do it with. Not even that she had chosen to do it. Or even that she was passing up the opportunity of a lifetime gto stick it to The Old Man. No. It was for the very opposite. She knew that Bear was disappointed in her because she didn’t pursue it: the oddly shaped mismatched happiness she’d made. He was disappointed that she allowed Viv to bail her out – again. He was disappointed that she was…say it…a coward.

Chapter 21.

‘Bea gets it.’

Viv’s lips compress.

She had tried to hide the moment but she had sensed that he saw the shift of light move across her face. The tectonic plates of lost emotions and hidden secrets shifting behind her eyes were hard to conceal. He had suddenly looked at her in a way quite different to the way he ever had before.

He had suddenly become, cautious, circumspect: hurt but most importantly crushingly curious at what had passé for what seemed to him like his mum having a fully paid up nervous breakdown disguised as a silent burp.

Viv had no choice. She had told him in the car, in the middle of handing him a boiled sweet.

The truth had just fallen through her lips, softly, quietly.

She had been overwhelmed she told Bea, the sheer weight of the twelve years and all of her fears and doubts about herself, about Bea, about what they had done, the decision they had made and what would happen when it all unraveled.

Is that why she did it? For the boy. Or was it because at that moment beautiful brilliant Bea needed to become flawed, fallible, fractured. Imperfect in a real everyday way, as opposed to some windswept, abstracted off beat cool way.

It all suddenly felt like a bad piece of psycho-babble – that everything must be deconstructed before it can be reconstructed – unstained and free of the labyrinth of feeling, trauma, hurt, collapse, coping and silent endeavor that confected its original.

Perhaps Viv was scared that without the complex cats-cradle of ‘making’ we might all become lesser for it: less rich in our being and more one dimensional in our existence.

Viv sometimes wondered how she ended up with the reputation for ‘still waters’ given that for one, hers were not still, far from it, they were in fact quite patently rough most of the time.

Equally a facility for labyrinthine complexity and machination of an almost medieval degree was utterly absent in her – her one dimensional ‘does what it says on the tin’ approach to life delivering the polar opposite even when a far greater degree of sophistication in thought and action demanded otherwise: well, apart from just once. But to be fair that was almost the death of her.

Doug shrugged. Whatever. They’d been in the bar for a wee while and he was hungry but not fussed. Micky wanted to get a pie at the pub but Gordo demanded Fish N Chips from the chippie: like they didn’t see enough fish.

It had been a bright day for December. Last year’s storms hovered in the back of his mind. Bloody awful. And he wondered whether this year would be any different.

A north-westerly coming in over the top of the bay kept the clouds high and light. A wee bit of rain in the morning but nothing to write home about. Doug lazily kicked a stone perched on the edge of the kerb. He winced as it picked up speed down the hill, suddenly scudding left, towards a girlie. It clattered by her feet but she seemed oblivious.

Her feet: Doug was in the middle of thinking this half odd when he was distracted from his train of thought by Gordo punching him in the upper arm. Bastard. Since they started on the boats Gordo had become more of a kid than ever. Doug didn’t really know Micky but Gordo and he had kicked around since they were about six or so.

Every now and then a thought crossed Doug’s mind that made sense of something or other. This wasn’t one of those occasions.

Gordo was a wiry, blue-skinned fisher boy. His coppery hair was a slathered-over slick of cow-lick meets Oasis (pick a Gallagher any Gallagher). Much like his hair, Gordo spent most of the time just slightly out of control.

Recently though it was starting to get out of hand. It usually started with a glance and an exchange between Gordo and some bloke or other: then one’d have a pop at the other and before you knew it they’d all be rolling around on the ground like someone in a Die Hard movie.

Gordo had a tendency to spout phrases from his favourite films while having the fight, all part of some rolling movie in his head.

The most confusing of them all was when Gordo used a line from his favourite old movie Lawrence of Arabia.

Seeing Gordo wade into a load of pilly pin-eyed Scallies and Mancs shouting ‘we’ve taken Akabar, me and the wogs…’ was one of the most surprising things that Doug had ever witnessed – but not quite as much as the tenement boys Gordo usually chose to take a run at.

This usually gave Gordo an advantage in the fighting department because the poor bastards were either so confused or wrong footed by his ramblings that they usually forgot to get stuck in right away.

Doug would, as always, have to go and reach into the frantic twisting of what was Gordo and his current victim, lifting them off and putting them to one side.

He would then dust off Gordo, berate him, usually while trying to hold the now risen victim at bay with a large calloused hand, until he, Gordo and whomsoever was with them kicked off down the street with the other man’s curses hot in their ears.

Bloody fighting all the time: Doug thought the exertion of the Boats, the sheer freezing brutality of it might have put some lead in those flailing hay-maker arms of Gordo’s: but it just seemed to make his fists heavier and faster in the swinging.

Doug hated fighting; surprising for someone who was so good at it. He did not see the need to recreate your own little hell every Friday night.

Two nights; they were in for two nights until they set out for The Hook. Two nights – and out of their depth in another world.

They are a dead breed here – the fishing left a long time ago – and apart from the rare boat like the one they were on, the big fishing was further north and hard to come by.

Gordo had been warned by the Skipper that his apprenticeship was over if he ended up in the Nick like the last time.

(Gordo had been arrested for brawling with most of the bar down the Legion. The police report stated that Gordo attacked a man armed only with a lady’s blue plastic handbag, half a light & bitter and the glass it came in. Thankfully the most serious injury had been to the Club Secretary’s eye when the clasp on the bag broke mid-swing, scattering the contents like daggers across the room, one hair clip in particular.)

Doug wondered whether he could get away with just one shore leave without Gordo ruining it.

The punch in his upper arm hurt like bloody murder. Girl’s feet. The girl’s feet were bare. She’s off her head he thought, only half realizing that he was in fact walking towards her in a slight daze.

A noise; a familiar noise. His name. Mickey calling his name. Mickey had spotted the chippy. The three of them wheel right towards the bleak bright light shining through the fat, flat, blue-painted letters.

Scrapings. A bag of scrapings and chips. Battered saveloy for the brave.

Doug looked away from the acidic fat fry to his feet. He did this a lot for very little reason. It just felt quite comfortable to drop your head and feel the muscles through the back of your neck stretch tight. Next to his steel-toed boots, the right one pitted and scarred from where he kicked the lever on the winch, stood two small pink, dirty, pretty feet.

Dirty pretty.

His eyes followed up the line from where the turn-ups revealed the stitching, up the seam, indigo jeans stretched tight over muscular but well-formed legs. Beyond the legs – midrift – and the beginnings of a jumper, ribbed, thick; but waisted and short like the fashion had them wear.

(Doug looked away to the door and back again – possibly just to check that it really was the month it was and he really was in the same freezing cold place as the inhabitant of the mid-rift revealing sweater.)

Stuck on top of the jumper, punctuated by two of the deepest ultramarine eyes he’d ever set his own grey-brown pools on, sat the face of the woman he would love forever.

Her face, still and pale at first, seemed to open like curtains on a sunny day. Her smile folded over his heart in a red wrap of happiness.

Doug felt something at the centre of him – a feeling – turn and expand.

“hello”

“hello”

‘how y’ doing?’

“good, nice, yeah. How y’ doing?”

The girl pauses and looks at him with a small tilt of her head.

“Do you just repeat everything or do you make up your own sentences?”

“what?”

”Sentences: are you just going to repeat mine or will you make up your own?”

The smile belied the sharpness of the question: and Doug was a bit lost to know how to respond.

The women where Doug came from either put drunk hands on you or curled them into a fist and stuck them in your eye. Or hit you with a heel if they were at the ‘heels off’ end of a night out.

They rarely used words to bite; they had teeth for that.

Her voice was southern; soft; different to the guttural crawl of words that poured out of the mouths of the mothers and sisters of the boat boys in the bay he came from.

He fidgeted. Then spoke before thinking.

“I’ve a mind”

“A mind to what?”

Bollocks thought Doug. A smart arse. But mother, those eyes.

“It wasn’t an accusation.”

He looked at her and panicked. Hot fingers of shame crept up his throat and he collapsed backwards through the years to a birthday: he was five and they said ‘sing ye bastard sing’ and he couldn’t. Nor could he run away. He wanted to run away.

He began to apologise for being, well, not what he thought she might have wanted him to be.

He was so busy apologizing to her in his head he didn’t hear the soft words tumble over her lips; he just felt the cool fingers of her hand on his throat. The lava subsided and his heart lurched to a stop.

“Shall we eat”

‘What?’

She pointed to his food, now resting in a freshly staining paper wrap on the counter.

“We in a rush then?”

“Yes”

“Alright then”

He slipped the wrap off the counter and turned out towards the door with her.

As Doug trailed out the door he passed Micky and Gordo who seemed oblivious to his leaving.

It was as if she’d spirited him out of the chip shop in an invisible wrap of staining newspaper and her smile.

He watched her feet as they stepped in front of him. The soles were black and slick with the rain salt spit from the granite paving slabs.

“So where we going then”.

“LTs.”

“What’s LTs when it’s at home?”

The last part of the question took on a woofing like quality as the chip he bit into deposited its incendiary fat sodden middle onto his tongue.

“Kind of a club – bands – live music.”

“Who’re we seeing then? Someone big?”

“Little Angels.”

Fuck knows who they are thinks Doug. His tongue has started to cool a little. So he tries talking.

“Where’s your shoes?”

She looked at her feet, as if it had just occurred to her that she had no shoes on.

She stopped.

“I gave them to a man with none.”

“A man? You gave your shoes to a man?”

“Yes.”

He wanted to say you’re truly out of your mind; it’s December and it’s freezing; and you’ve no shoes; and shoes are important.

If you’ve got a pair of boots or trainers that you’ve coughed up for you should wear them with pride.

People got mugged for trainers.

You’ve got to have too much money if you’re giving the likes of your shoes to a man you don’t know on a cold port night.

But he didn’t: that would be rude; aye, bloody rude; not what you’d say to the woman you will love forever.

His eyes searched the floor in the half-light: there was glass and bottle tops and the crisp bags in the gutter.

“I hope he has pretty feet”

Her aquamarine pools blinked and sparked back at him: and the barefoot girl and the fisher boat boy walked on, he blindly behind her, his mind lost to wondering many things but mainly to wondering her name. Hope maybe. Hope. After years of bloody awfulness to meet Hope in bare feet in a back street chippie in Scarborough on a December night would be a beautiful thing indeed. The kind songs are written about.

Doug’s version of hope, the one he kept locked tight in the metal box of himself, was a different hope to the one carried around by the brick thick boys on the boats: with faces like memories and fists like paddled bats of splintered decking and whale thick skin.

Not much had changed for them really – for centuries – and even now, with the world turned upside down and all but over – still much the same. Their hope lived quietly, hidden, shored up in booze, birds and the money they earned out in the leathery black tides of the North Sea. Fixed. Secured. Tied.

Doug thought his hope seemed to come from a different place: a moving place where the lines didn’t matter anymore, or the rattle of your accent or the callouses on your hands or the scars across your heart.

All you needed was some belief in the amazing: and in the kindness that frees people to be truly great: in a world where a man like Doug would forfeit his people’s inheritance and his ‘place’ in the world and follow a barefoot woman out of a chippy to a place where hope sang with barely a backward glance.

That would be extraordinary.

The extraordinary would free you in the end Doug believed; somehow somewhere, but it would free you. No hope and you’re tied to a past and a life not worth living. Last Christmas as Doug had felt the first heavy weather roll in off the spume he knew that it was to be a special year: a year of extraordinary things.

“What’s your name?”

“B”

“Oh.”

Not Hope.

“Disappointed?”

“Nope.”

“Right.”

“So B then, as in?”

“B as in Beatrice.”

“Oh.”.

Pretty name.

“Sorry”

“What you sorry about?”

She looked at him, smiled that smile and took his open hand and walked on.

“Doug; my name’s Doug.”

Said more to remind himself that it really was him standing there than to identify himself.

“Good.”

Doug’s fingers trawled the outlines of his face – a small loop and Bos’un’s Knot plays through the fingers of his other hand.

The Bosun’s Knot. It went with him everywhere: roping and tying his memory to him; a reminder of a childhood spent tying and untying boatmen’s knots for his father to disapprove of and throw back in his face.

Once a particular knot had been particularly bad. His father’s chopped-loin fingers simply pulled it though until it was tight like a fist; and proceeded to beat Doug soundly without any trace of emotion until it had woven flaxen patterns across his shoulders, face and back.

Doug turned the knot over through his fingers, feeling its rubbing against his palm.

His poor mother – she had tried to intervene, only to be knocked sideways; as always.

It was the only time his father seemed to focus on her properly, when he was squaring to hit her. Hitting was what Doug’s father did; between working like a bastard and drinking like something he caught.

There was nothing subtle about Doug’s Da. He was very obvious in every way.

At one point Doug had looked up through the beating and saw his father actually reposition himself – to get a better grip on the rope, and to get a bit more swing on it.

Bastard.

Thorough perhaps, but a bastard none the less.

Doug’s father was a scuffed stone of a man soaked with the sea and colder than the deepest part of it. Doug had never really understood what bought his mother back to that bleak place and to the life and bed of that man.

Scarborough. It tugged at his heart. It was in his blood

Milly, his mother, was a teacher. She taught the young scrapings of the fishing families under the bleak blue of the strip light in small pre-fab classroom that sat just above the old Friend’s Meeting House near the petrol station. The school was mixture of small Victorian school house, prefab 60s bolt on and some outhouses. And a rather rust riddled lean-to bike shed. Milly’s domain was the 60s bit. Damp. Leaking. Bleak.

She had always coddled Doug, the youngest boy. Unlike the other two, Doug was always a little lost.

A dreamer; soft his father said. Full of words and rubbish and ideas that would drown him one day – because he’d be thinking of them when his mind should be on the sea.

So, Doug had lived his young life trapped in the screaming cavity between his inside and his out.

He had also learned to fight like a bastard. It was the perfect disguise. He hid every word he ever read, every poem his mother had ever taught him and every dream he’d ever entertained behind a curtain of random violence, very quick to fists and flailing lest anybody get the idea that he was a jessie.

That was his entertainment in this fishing land by the sea where weather and time rolled across the water to wash up frothing in the harbour at the bottom of the cliffs. The fishing village was made up of a collection of old cottages and new builds that stumbled down the steep hill to collapse around each other’s shoulders in a heap by the quay.

There was one small, singular thick-walled pub, part old, part 1950s build out, its inside a smoker’s lung, fugged with old fags and beer breath, the air cut every now and then by the slick, spilled sweetness of a rum and coke or one of those alco-pop drinks that the lasses tanked through.

Outside, the boats, the ones still working, jostled each other in the crook of the harbour, skittish, straining at their leads, waiting for their owners, the nets spread like webs behind them. Like creatures from a time forgot.

His grandfather had said that the day they slipped the drift nets off and dressed the purses in they killed themselves – as greed got hold of them by the scruff of the neck – them, the Frenchies, the Dutch and the Belgians – and suffocated the life out of the North Sea.

The fishermen had lost their voice in the world. And increasingly their memory – as the generational Alzheimers kicks in and enters them into a time of forgetting.

Doug’s mother had always struggled to be heard. That was because she spoke as opposed to the other women who cawed, screeched and attacked, scared of anything they didn’t know and the world outside the one they ruled.

She had every right to stand shoulder to shoulder with them. Milly was the last generation in a long line of Scottish Lasses, the teaming hordes of bright strong and adventurous girls and women who provided the desperately needed labour – the gutters the pickers and the packers – to keep the explosive growth of the North Sea Herring Industry and its output on track.

When the fishing industries of the late 18th and 19th centuries were still powerhouses of opportunity, work and profit, thousands of them would edge down the country, shadowing the herring shoals and the fleets that stalked them down the North East coast of Scotland and England.

Milly loved her mother’s Lasses’ stories. Her mother had loved her Scarborough times – days of hard work friendships and freedom. The Scarborough folk had the same attitude to ‘blowins’ that they had in her home village. Just like us. Not showy. Not good with strangers. Not like Hull or Grimsby. Every Tom Dick and Harry there.

Milly had every right to stand tall. But perhaps her mother wanting more for Milly – wanting her to finally step out of the scale-strewn floor and out of the rented rooms and the smell of it all – had severed the chord forever between the her and the old breed of fisher women. Milly wasn’t one of them – one of ‘us’ – anymore. She had set aside her roots and ‘got ideas above her station’. Or her mother had and Milly had concurred.

‘Teacher indeed. Get over yourself lass.’

Their fishing village was as every fishing village. Brined in it. Knowing nothing else. Or wanting to. Even as the corpse of it began to rot.

Every man in the village lived breathed and died fishing, the violence of their lives seamlessly moving between land and sea, rolling off the deck on to the shore like a wave. Doug’s father and brothers were no different.

To stop fighting, even while away from the water, was to leave yourself ill-prepared for the next time she might pick a fight with you. But the fishing was all but disappeared– leaving many of the young men locked in a vacuum, propped like side show wax works of a trade that once was, there only for people to point and stare.

The greater the dislocation became between the men and the sea they served, the greater the violence ingrained inside them flared and burned. Doug’s father stoked that violence in his softest son, plying it, teasing it into something bigger. He did it to spite Doug’s mother and he did it to spite the boy. She simply continued to share her dreams and her words with the boy far away from his father’s prying eyes.

Unknown to her, his brothers’ green eyes noted every occasion when she did and passed them on to their father on his return, seeking only to please him and set themselves apart from their Mother’s precious little boy.

Doug’s Father, against his Mother’s best endeavours, triumphed in the end.

One night the violence went too far, sweeping Doug away from his mother, snapped free of her at last by the only thing his father understood.

He had not meant to hurt the man. He wanted to make him see sense. Knock him about a bit. Doug hated the pack animal frenzies that he saw in the shopping-centres at night. Call themselves men? He always carried his own fights and never set out to do more than shake people up.

This time though he was too much his father and little enough him – and the small, beautiful light that flickered in the corner of his soul was blown to black by the actions of his fists.

Doug’s father made no effort to disguise the joy he took in this Action of his youngest son, his words of pride clattering out of his mouth across his brittle, spittle-flecked lips; plumbing every depth of pleasure he took in celebrating the act of mindless insanity that had cut his son adrift from his mother forever.

His Da’s forensic interest in the detail of what Doug had done to the young man now lying in the hospital, barely connected to his life by tubes and monitor wires, was a crime all of itself.

Doug’s mother had sat in her old peach dressing gown, half slumped and half folded over in the small easy chair by the door.

She already knew what her son had done before he walked into the house. The gossip machine worked at speed in a village as small and incestuous as this. The news hung around her like a thick black wrap. He could not look at her. She could not look at him.

The police had come soon after. She recognized one as a boy who used to be in her class. He could be barely twenty years old and here he was for her boy – her little boy. A small tongue of rain spray from the previously open door speckled across the floor and over her bare feet. She’d forgotten to put her slippers on. She hated them anyway. One of the things her husband quietly despised about her. Bare feet. Like a mad woman from an institution. She was a teacher for God’s sake. Set an example he thought

The door was now closed, the departing Doug leaving a still black sadness in his wake so leaden that she could barely lift her head. The light warped across her face. Her eyes turned to coal and the light in her heart went out.

Over the following days and weeks after that night his mother retreated into reading in silence, unconcerned as to anyone else in the house and their needs. She would sing the gaelic folk songs of the Lasses that her mother had taught her word for word, as she had learned them, by joyous rote.

Milly did not leave her job, or get fired.

She just never went up the hill again, the door of her class remaining shut until her replacement arrived, fresh with vigour and egalitarian dreams.

Doug’s mother never cooked another meal again for Doug’s father or his brothers. They never asked for nor expected one. Doug’s father never lifted a finger nor raised his voice again to the woman he had destroyed. In exchange she never noticed nor looked directly at him ever again.

Only once, when he moved a small, cheaply framed picture of Doug that she kept on the sill by the chair where she read to provoke her, did she gather herself up, walk across the room to the fireplace, select the poker, walk up to him, and bring it down across his back, fiercely with all her might, in firmly applied rhythmic loathing for twenty or so strokes.

She returned the poker to the fireplace, stepping over his collapsed body to return to her chair, leaving her second youngest son to call the ambulance and report ‘the fall’. That she had cracked three of his vertebrae, broken two ribs, ruptured his spleen and committed him to a lifetime of excoriating back pain was of no interest to her.

She knew that the pride of his violent masculinity would never allow him to complain or berate. That would be unmanly. That would be to be a jessy in his world. She simply repositioned the picture frame and took up her book again to read. She suffocated slowly and quietly over some years, the weight of her disappointment and loss finally killing her quietly in her bed.

The exchange by the door was the last time Doug and his mother would ever share an intimacy. Doug went on an extended tour of fishing duty on the atlantic boats and then to the ivory coast to work on the wet storage boats moving legal and not so legal goods up and down the coast; just to let the squall pass.

He never saw his mother alive again. She died a year or so later, her funeral a blur. They had waited for him. They were decent enough to do that. But by the end of the afternoon on which she was buried, under the billow of another storm rolling in, Doug was already on his way to Manchester airport, for a three part journey back to the steaming hulls of Cote D’Ivoire. And now he was back. And the few years between then and now feel like centuries.

Doug fingers the noose. He made a promise to himself that night and it was one that he fully intended to keep. Promises.

Life was full of them: most of which he ignored for the tease they were. But there were promises of hope locked in the direction of the barefoot girl in front of him. A promise he was happy to pursue for just a while anyway . They walked on towards a small building with people milling outside.

The band. They weren’t bad if he remembered right. It was a home game for them. This was home. All a bit poodle and hairspray for Doug. But where the bare feet went, so went Doug.

As they stood outside, Doug caught two figures swooping across the road, cawing and soaring in and about each other like gulls turning wheels in the air: Gordo and Micky. And Gordo with blood spotting from a cut above his eye. Bloody hopeless

Chapter 17.

Bea sits at her kitchen table. Her fingers gently finger the pages of the newspaper. The radio chirps along in the background. Careful what you wish for her father had always told her.

Tom will be here soon. Is there ever a right time she asks herself? The rhetoric of her thoughts is not lost on her. She agreed with her sister a long time ago that when the time came to reveal the truth she would just do it. They would not discuss it and pore over the ‘hows, whens and whys’ of it all.

Bea felt the pressure on her chest shift slightly to the right. Isn’t fear an amazing thing. The phone rings. She slides out of the chair and walks into the hall. She picks up the receiver, the smell of a hundred old mouths, her mouths, meets her nose. The line crackles. Nothing. The white noise washes up and down the length of the line like soft, tidal waves.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

“Anyone there?”

Nothing. She puts the receiver down, the sound of the telephonic surf falling into the distance. She returns to the table.

The newspaper’s pages are filled to bursting with theories about which way the country is headed. No change there then.‘Down the pan’ says the Sun. God bless the Sun. They had made the momentous step of getting Page 3 to revert to a Sun Stunna collection – with a young lady from each potential new neighbouring landmass. Tops on of course. Never to return to the heyday of young women’s breasts filling the silences in every workers’ café and van and lorry cab up and down the country.

They had quickly worked their way through the Dutch, the Danish, the Swedes, the Icelanders and the Greenlanders and were, currently featuring any one of a number of swimwear girls from the East Coast edition of Sports Illustrated.

Bea had recently taken to devouring every paper every day, bobbling between sheer terror at the ways of people and the crashing comedy of desperate newspaper flailing. She was never disappointed.

The relentless obsession with the ‘special relationship’ with America, one so close to the English heart, for better or for worse, continued unabated and with a new sharpened purpose. The Daily Express had chided everyone for just sitting there and not trying everything in our power to ‘Not go the way of the Americans’.

A reader’s Poll in the Express revealed that the rather thin and self-congratulatory double meaning they’d applied to the ‘Go The Way’ part of the slogan had been lost on approximately 83% of readers.

The Telegraph had simply reverted, via a few hot stories of ministerial profiteering (and a misguided interview with the gleeful camel-coated one smoking outside the pub), to a pre-1900 editorial stand-point, rummaging in their antique wooden chest of words from the exploratory, expeditionary Victorian past to celebrate and describe everything from the new ticketed petrol vending to cliff perching sea birds: flora & fauna always especially close to their hearts.

They had intended to marshal interest in the destruction caused by the spillages from North Sea pipes rent open as the landmass had bobbed off its latitude mark. But the growing distance between the people and the problem left the fish and sea beds of the North Sea, previously in very close proximity to the Scottish, coast feeling like so many Darfurians: totally out of sight and very out of mind

The Telegraph had also reignited their old relationship with the National Geographic Society and taken to mapping every movement of the island with expeditionary gusto and military precision, with the help of GPS and its old contacts at the Ministry For Defence & Homeland Security.

They were just happy now to be able to refer to everyone on the island as intrepid, imbued with the rich patina of the pioneering British spirit, each one of us a Shackleton in his or her own right.

Toooot.

Bea slinked across the kitchen towards the Aga where the kettle was now tooting impatiently. The scuff of her own slippers against the cool flags irritated her. Ironic given that it was an affectation that she’d originally developed solely to irritate her father, flack flacking around the highly polished wooden floors of the family home, making him wince.

She had even managed to talk her sister into doing the same. They would let the irritation build up to deafening as they wandered around the house. The synchronised flacking one could unleash across those expansive wooden floored rooms if you put your mind to it was, on certain days, verging on waterboarding in its application and cruelty.

She could amplify the impact of this at any time by reverting to her barefoot bandit persona for a few weeks, a silent but equally devastating tactic.

Arguments – Bea had mastered every shape, shade and form of them when it came to her father, her single-minded and wild eyed focus was awesome to witness.

Having palmed two, or was it three hob-nobs into her right hand from the grey-green biscuit jar to the right of the Aga, Bea stepped across to where the kettle perched.

She dropped the bag into the cup, and poured the steaming funnel of water down on to it.

She slopped in some milk and left it to swirl around as she flacked back to the pile of newspapers.

She sat and surveyed the scene of countless crumpled leaves of inked polemic in front of her, another catching her eye. As she hummed and looked further a scatter of crumbs from another bite of the biscuit held in her mouth made patterns on the page immediately below her, punctuating the blocks of text – little baked prompts and markers to random words and sentences.

Strange patterns wound themselves around the page, like fantastical maps, puzzling, codified and waiting to be broken.

Perhaps if Bea could link the words that each crumb pointed some reason would be ‘revealed’.

Everything was a bloody revelation at the moment as far as everyone was concerned. She bit again, this time sweeping the crumbed punctuation away immediately.

The Telegraph in tandem with the Daily Mail had also developed a role as ‘the voice’ for those Distant Islanders still under the governance of Westminster.

It seemed the Falkland Islanders (plus the odd veteran) and people from the Shetlands had some profoundly disturbing things in common.

The main one being this: if The Floating Island State of Great Britain was to eventually anchor herself up somewhere near Port Stanley, would she, if provoked, unleash her war machine half way across the world to save the Scilly Islanders from an aggressive incursion by volatile Bretons in smart smocks, waggling dangerous sausages claiming it for Belle France?

Or if Shetland was in danger of being recolonized by the Viking hordes of Denmark (though this time to be fair they would be bringing 3 star Michelin eateries, clean energy solutions, modular furniture and an endless supply of small, brightly-coloured and heavily franchised children’s building bricks) would Westminster dispatch the Sea lords to duff the Nordics up a bit and put them in their place?

The strangest comments had come from some random Falkland Islanders who in response to this discourse had mooted that they were a bit miffed at the idea of the Motherland ending up parked somewhere off their shores: something to do with enjoying the distance, all the better to appreciate all things being British while far enough away from the greedy eyes and paws of centralized government and random interference.

Anyway, Devolution had been mentioned which was jaw-droppingly remarkable, thought the Telegraph. Fight a bloody war for them and what do the ungrateful bastards want – devo-bloody-lution. Bad as the bloody Scots.

Bea found herself getting up earlier and earlier and not leaving the house until later and later as the sheer scale of the ‘news’ mounted up on her kitchen table.

It was currently 1.30pm: she had stepped into the kitchen at 7am. There were upsides to this obsession playing out on the table in front of her.

This great event had been the saving grace of the Newspaper industry as a whole.

The hysterical speed at which the smart phone world could deliver atomised news suddenly seemed utterly pointless. The speed of their progress seemed to set the pace for everything. And the dislocated unfeeling tsunami of data pointed ‘stuff’ suddenly felt very cold and distant.

There was something about the tactile pulpy nature, the realness of a newspaper, clutched tightly for all its worth, that reassured the reader.Newspapers smelled of something. They were rather persuasive. They affected how you thought. Newspapers rubbed off on you.

And people could share stuff over newspapers. Pointing at stuff, comparing things and generally just ‘leaning in’ to each other: you had to get up close and personal with a newspaper. You can’t really hunker over someone else’s crackberry to share in the fun of their news feed.

The internet was great but it was ‘out there’ which was fine when you’re not. But when you become as ‘out there’ as the medium, its attraction seemed to wane a bit.

Bea loved the Met Office – for more than just the obvious reason of the link to the Shipping Report.

The Met Office could always be relied upon to develop a new model for something. In the instance they had developed a whole new continental shift model of weather reporting specifically to cope with the now utterly random weather patterns caused by the combination of weather fronts moving towards around and behind us and us doing quite the same to the weather fronts. Regardless of finding themselves a few thousand miles elsewhere, the weather people still held a pining attachment to the fortunes of the Gulf Stream which, after having a very confused fortnight swerving towards Norway, doubling back towards the Dutch coast creating an unknown spat of decent weather and stopping just off the coast of County Cork, finally slipped back into it old habits with added gusto, inadvertently turning the Scillies into the new St. Barts in the process.

(The other small fly in the global ointment was the matter of time. Now time should be simple and straightforwards – the small glitch was that Greenwich was now quite a distance from its emphatic world clock shaping position of 51.4826° N, 0.0077° W. So the world experts in time were currently throwing a few suggestions around – but hadn’t got much further that the idea of placing a marker at that precise latitudinal and longitudinal position – but which would be used a little like the Plinth in Leicester Square – to exhibit artworks of national and international interest (though even this framing was proving an issue as the EU and the UN were still trying to figure out whether the sovereign waters of the UK were abstracted from the actual material mass of the UK or needed to stay firmly attached to it).

Bea slouched backwards into the nobbled uprights of the back of the kitchen chair and smiled to herself.

Maybe at some point they would float up to a large sign-post in the middle of the Atlantic swell – a sign with two arrows, one pointing to ‘Hope’, the other to ‘Oblivion’, not forgetting that ‘Down The Pan’ would be first right at the lights.

Some people are very excited. And some people are very scared. The unknown is very scary to some. Bea thinks the unknown is the most exciting thing ever.

She had lived here for twelve years now but talked little of the lifetime she lived before it. She’d felt feelings that the people around her, the people that she knew as her neighbours and friends, would never know.

Bea had created the extraordinary from the inside out. Though doing extraordinary things isn’t always the most popular thing to do – as she sensed that the ordinarily quite ordinary boy may just be about to find out.

It had not gone down very well with her father. Bea remembered the expression on his face when she told him that sunny afternoon in April. She had been standing half in and half out of the door of the library, diagonally across the room from where he was busily perusing the bookshelf.

She distinctly remembered that the taste of marmite and the burnt edges of toast had played around the back of her mouth as she stood there. (Bea always burned her toast.) The day had come when she could no longer pretend that perhaps the month was being unkind to her and her tummy was just a little bloated.

He had said nothing the day he picked her up from the station a couple months or so before hand, though the light and distant look in her eyes had created an almost unbearable desire in him to ask her what universal axis had shifted between before and today.

Perhaps he was reticent to ask in earshot of his driver.

“Hi Bear.”

“Hello Bea.”

Her father disliked the degree of familiarity that she had cultivated with Michael.

Both the girls had become very firmly fond of him. And their father felt that with every small pull of the rope towards them Michael was pulled just that little bit further away from him.

She had clambered into the back of the car in a highly un-ladylike manner. She knew that his perfect little world disintegrated just that little bit more with every shred of poise that she discarded. The truth was that her father had been side tracked from this line of questioning by the absence of her shoes.

“You gave them to a man?”

The slightly rising screech in her father’s voice pointed to the fact that he was unable to always remain so passively intellectual about quite everything.

“Yes.”

“OK.”

“How’s Viv?”

‘Fine. Hangs around the house a lot. You know, little Jaqui’s gorgeous. I think things are alright. He seems to take care of her…but…I just wish…’

“He was less common?”

“That’s unkind and unfair…”

“Of course – what am I saying. It could have been much worse – he could have been black”

“Oh please we’re not going to…”

He stopped, either unwilling to disclose what he knew in front of Michael or unwilling to add his own conjecture to an already complicated situation.

“She’s fine…she’s missed you: she misses you.”

The pregnant pause hung in the car’s atmosphere feeling, for once, quite at home given the condition of one of the passengers.

“I miss her.”

Then that pause again, longer now

“Don’t want to know how your mother is?”

Bea had stared blankly out of the window – being Bea. Michael’s eyes watched her through the rear view mirror, curious to see how she would respond.

“She’s not my Mother.”

Her father loved Beatrice, his perfect little girl: but he hated Bea, because Bea was the woman who had taken all that was good in Beatrice: the gentle spirit and the light and the joy, the sharp curiosity: Bea was the young woman who had taken the child. She had taken her and turned her into an impulsive, difficult, willful, highly intelligent young woman who would not be denied.

Beautiful Beatrice had slowly over the last year or so turned into Bea. And Bea was the one who openly mocked her father’s politics and his publicly stated opinions. He hated that she had chosen not to be an accessory to his beliefs. Much to his annoyance she also seemed to be doing quite a good job of poisoning Michael against him.

She liked to find quick and easy ways of needling the middle class conformist in him. The recent development of her penchant for disposing of her footwear at the strangest times to the strangest people was remarkably effective in setting off is nervous social tick.

He was not from high enough up the social food chain to be blessed with the luxury of non-conformity. She knew that he quietly loathed this truth about himself. She knew that he dreamed of being ‘one of them’: the disheveled velvet Aristocrats that inhabited the comic society book in his mind.

It was a sign of freedom she said: she “wasn’t a cart horse forced to be shod”.

Her ‘mother’ Ellie, his second wife, hated Bea’s reappearances, viewing them the way some English women were forced to view loneliness or fat ankles: with a creeping resignation to their inevitability.

Ellie believed that Bea should have left home a long time ago: found herself a job; moved on; moved out.

Well, Bea thought; she had certainly moved on.

“She worries.”

“Sure.”

Her father had a tendency to put the words that described his own fears and concerns into the mouth of his new wife. Bea believed that he did this for a couple of very good reasons.

The first good reason was that it enabled him to hide his own deep wells of fear and vulnerability in someone else.

The second very good reason was that it was his indirect way of humanizing; softening her, this putting evidence of intimate caring or concern into her brittle mouth.

She knew that the witch was far happier when Bea was away. She could hide herself in the inane chop and scatter of Jamie’s bruschetta, some expensive lipstick and the mere physical presence of Bear being in their home from time to time.

Her father was used to Bea following ‘stupid’ bands around the country. Her father used words like that when he was scared and he was scared because he knew his daughter; and he knew the sheer expressive joy that living generated in her both spiritually and physically.

Everything that loosened the ties that bound them to him scared him. Scarborough had seemed a very long way away in December. They had let her go because she was going to go anyway whatever they said.

Bea found out that the witch had laughed in his face when he eventually told her about Bea’s ‘condition’.

She also found out that they had fought; bitterly. The witch had mocked him for his soft naivette. To his surprise, a furious anger welled from somewhere deep within him. It was the one of the few times that deeply unpleasant stain he kept hidden deep inside his highly controlled box of a life had leaked out in a fire spit traveling through his hand, forcing him to clutch and squeeze her arm very tightly: too tightly.

They both became aware of Viv, standing in the doorway accompanied by Bear. He had driven her to and from the supermarket at her father’s request while they baby-sat Viv’s little girl, now almost forgotten in her baby seat the mist of raised voices and palpable spite.

Bear had told Bea afterwards what had occurred.

Viv had apparently stared at them for a while, as if taking in the content and cause of their argument, blinked once, slowly, and walked away; away and up the stairs to where Bea sat waiting.

Bear had also intervened physically, walking across the room in four or five sinewy strides, his left hand reaching forwards, the calloused weight of his hand gently wrapping itself around Peter Davis’s right arm, the skin whitening under his grip.

Bear’s other arm moved simultaneously upwards cutting a space between Peter and Ellie, driving a soft wedge between them until they popped apart. Bea remembered that day as if it were both yesterday and never.

“Give him to me.”

Viv had walked softly and purposefully to the room at the far end of the house – the room where Bea sat hunched on the edge of the daybed (her favourite daybed in her favourite corner of the house, its comforting blue poplin embroidered with small floral motifs embossing themselves into her legs as she tucked them up beneath her). Viv just walked in and said it, directly, without emotion, flatly; it was almost a demand.

Schist & Leaving.

Schist. Michael would happily and without any trace of over cranked-sentiment admit that he loves the word.

Schist Schist Schist.

A guilty pleasure for a man who should know better than to play childish games with the English language – BUT – there was something of the divine collision in the word for him.Schist was more than just rock. Schist is where Schism meets Glisten. Where the rip and rent of timeless fixing, of rock in the ground ripped through with it, meets a liquid trickle of blackness.It’s the isthmus of it, the sliver of dark starkness set out against the sea of stone around it. The Christmas dark twinkle in it that he loves.

He vaguely tried to remember once why it had risen to such exalted heights in his mind – people like Michael didn’t really do word play or invest magical or mythical properties into anything beyond ordinance.There was no particular love at first sight moment that he could pin point.

He remembered the name first popping up in class – though beyond Science’s place as a big word that explained how some things happen and questioned everything else, pure geology was scantily embraced at his thoroughly decent school, as were all things slightly too knowing or academic.

He remembered that there are a few types of schist – a definite picturing in his mind’s eye of some pale-grey and sandy-shale ones next to the black one – Mica Schist – on the Rocks, Minerals and Ores reference chart in the lab block.

And he remembered more recently the reoccurring pictures of dusty hieroglyph tablets and religious icons carved out of the dark stuff in the sheets of cultural back-up notes the Army Intelligence units (he wasn’t even going to go there) dispensed to them to inform and enrich their ability to live, thrive and survive in dusty lands with fragile regimes and fractious tribes for neighbours.

It had taken on a deeper meaning eventually, while he was scuffing around three feet deep in a hastily dug bunker outside the village just near the principal border.Schist. Black rock. A ribbon of it written into the rock strata they had hastily dug into.

What the fuck they were doing there was a small puzzle in itself. But the glistening black schist became his inner horizon line for the hours of cowering in that bunker, his face pressed into its shallow walls simply to reduce the amount of him showing to the armour-piercing rounds zipping over his head.

The low scent of the silent room drew him back from the panoramic black slash that had enveloped his mindSchist. It had popped up in the paper recently amongst the musing and the science fictions and the science facts.

Perhaps that was what had been quietly and quickly eroded away, leaving us free, cast adrift and floating into the sunset. It sounded sane enough: comparatively.Given the number of half-baked, fully roasted ideas bobbing around at the moment it could reasonably take its place without undue embarrassment amongst them and seem quite…sane.

The whole of Britain had been sitting on a massive plate of schist which for some inexplicable reason has just simply disappeared – inexplicable of course unless Arthur C Clarke or the various gods of different cultures and their legion of clerics had anything to say about it, in which case it was all apparently explained in a jiffy.

The room had started to roll in on Michael again. Oppressing him. It had a tendency to do that sometimes – question his purpose there – his right to exist within in its walls.

Rooms had minds of their own of that he was certain – their own personas, quirks, foibles and dynamics. What he was uncertain of was the provenance of his certainty – as to whether this certainty was due to some random and uninvited voodoo infestation in his psyche – or whether it was rooted in the molecular atomic truth that an atom never dies – just reapplying itself elsewhere in our material being existence and environment – and therefore atoms which had been at some point involved in unpleasantness or wholly negative activity – atoms not predisposed to being sociable or positive – could potentially come into a closed room and become trapped, claustrophobic and quickly unpleasant – like people on a cruise or those stuck in a lift.

Was he in fact in bad atomic company? The question unfettered itself and drifted out of his immediate passage of thought, only to be filled by another conundrum of spatial psychology.

There had never been a suitable explanation for the ‘uninvited return’ – a stark and foreboding atmospheric phenomenon that Michael had first identified as a young man.

The Uninvited Return was a unique experience that occurred only when just having left one’s place of abode one realised that one had forgotten something and returned to it ‘too soon’, only to find the atmosphere, the very air in the place quite antagonistic, seemingly both shocked and resentful at your sudden and unexpected intrusion, as if you had stumbled in upon a secret – its desperately needed time of repair or repose perhaps – invading its most intimate and private time – its ‘other’ time – time uncluttered by your needs and expectations – time when its walls could air themselves and throw off the mantle of galleries and securities. Where the windows could stare out happily inert, liberated from having to be the thing through which people seek the succor and the information of the outside world, and by which they light their own. The floors desperately yearning to become solid once more, their hallways and split boards free of the oppression of carriage and journey.

Sometimes when Michael returned suddenly, he found himself feeling deeply ‘unwelcome’ in his own home; its petulance hanging in the air around him.

It was as if he had come upon an indiscretion barely veiled and quickly hidden from him – somehow invisible to him yet palpable and earnest to the space itself.

Leaving his home came to create a deep sense of foreboding in him – as if stepping away from a place in the full knowledge that deep and damaging betrayals would be quickly underway.

At first he felt that it might just be some shocking paranoia that riddled him exclusively. But in time others came to nod and agree – some quietly some gibbering at the sheer release of being able to say ‘yes yes YES! I KNOW that feeling!’

Curious: Perhaps his intimate space was trying to tell him something. Perhaps ‘leaving’ was the glistening schism in Michael’s world.

Abandonment. Abdication of meaning and feeling. Desertion.Perhaps the spatial spectre was trying to reconnect him with what mattered most for better or for worse – compelling him to hitch him-self to something of meaning once more.

Or perhaps he really had lost his mind a long time ago. The motes in the lightened air between him and the cupboard shifted.

Snog. Bog. Dog. Clog. They all sound a bit clumsy. Anyway. Snogging is what Jaqui does with the dangerous boy with the very white trainers. Snog isn’t the right word for what happened in the nano-space between his and Kathy’s lips.

As for Tongue Sandwich; well that’s just nasty. French Kiss? Not bad thinks Tom. No idea what it means but it sounds quite exotic – though the French part is maybe a little bit rude.

No. The Kiss is its formal name: and the ‘The‘ with a Capital T is important.

Tom draws the back of his hand across the chipped desktop, pushing down on the lead end of the pencil making the rubber end boing into mid-air. A small see saw of joy.

Even The Kiss does not describe the kiss. That’s Tom’s problem. The Kiss or the memory of it is something that hangs over Tom like a bat (a random creature selected by Tom for its ability to explain the feeling of a flappy dark thing that hovers above you in a scary way. He likes it because it is scary but not scary-bad in an Angel Of Death kind of way. The dark ominous bat thing works – though Tom’s creature of choice to describe a floaty nice moment – a small white hovering pony – needs a lot more work).

The Kiss was kind of an accident in a way but sort of on purpose in another because he’d been planning it in the corner of his mind for so long and dreaming of it for even longer.

Tom had literally bumped into Kathy while walking along the Avenue: and not just as a turn of phrase.

He had walked straight into her. This was quite embarrassing given the width of the road, the emptiness of the pavement, that fact that it was broad daylight and, worse of all, he was apparently looking straight at her when he walked straight into her.

“What the Fuck are you doing?”

Afterwards, the only explanation Tom could offer for ‘what the fuck’ he was doing was that he was so busy looking at Kathy in his mind’s eye that he failed to notice the real her coming towards him – until it was too late.

Tom remembered obsessing on this point at the time – which was rather pointless as Kathy was patently preoccupied with other things. Her swearing had only added to his confusion. Kathy had an older sister and so sometimes sounded a lot older than she was.

The ‘crashing into each other’ thing was quickly forgotten.

Kathy began talking in a kind of off-hand way about things Tom couldn’t quite hear properly. This was because he was still talking to her imaginary self inside his head, which made it hard for him to hear the real conversation going on outside his head; not that Kathy seemed to mind.

Tom wasn’t very good at stopping the chat inside his head when the outside one started – which was mostly due to lack of practice.

Until that moment 90% of all of Tom’s chats with Kathy had been imaginary – pure invention – so there hadn’t been much call for him to figure out how to have a real one – or at least move from the one happening inside his head to the one happening outside his head.

They ambled along the Avenue for a short way, Tom talking to Kathy in his head about Kathy in the flesh while Kathy in the flesh talked to Tom in the flesh about, well, something else that he wasn’t listening to.

They turned into the wood at a small opening in the bank. As they climbed up the bank the air changed colour turning from a grey white to a cool swampy blue – or at least that’s what it smelled like to Tom as the air wrapped around his neck and head.

The bank dropped away in front of them, its surface scattered with flints and roots.

They walked slowly, their chats tipping along nicely – including the one inside Tom’s head that he couldn’t quite bring himself to finish.

In fact, up until this moment, the two of them had managed to engage in two totally separate conversations. In Tom’s case three to be precise – as there was the Kathy chat inside his head, the one going on outside – and of course the little voice in the back of Tom’s mind covering off immediate questions and detail in regards to the general situation.

“Why’s she talking to me?”

“Do my trousers look cool or just OK?

“I wish my shoes didn’t make me feel like a loser”

“I wish I was wearing after shave.”

It was in the midst of this two way three voice conversation that the big moment – The Kiss – happened, totally out of the blue.

Thinking back on it Tom had put it down to a number of random coincidences.

He had been over this a number of times: to quite forensic degree and yes, he was going with coincidences.

As he remembered it, he had been talking to Kathy in a kind of ‘sideways-on-not-looking-at-her-but-feeling-the- electric-buzz -of-her-almost-touching-his-arm’ kind of thing.

Eventually Tom said something outside his head directly to the real Kathy.

“You’ve got a blue ring around the outside of your eyes”

SUBTITLE: I fancy you like mad.

The first coincidence dictated that she had spoken at the same time as him just to add to the confusion.

“Why are you always being so… weird?”

SUBTITLE: I like you-ish

This caused what Tom could only describe as some kind of rip in the space time continuum: a momentary pause in the outward expansion of the universe and a moment of alignment in the cosmos never to be repeated again.

The second and third of the coincidences were a sort of knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone event. Tom’s left foot stepped on a root sticking rather irresponsibly out of the ground, at which point mysteriously his right ankle did a rubbery bendy thing turning Tom in such a way that instead of falling away from Kathy and down the side of the bank – which in any universe at any given time given any law of any Physics is what ‘should’ have happened – he tipped towards Kathy.

Kathy was mid-question as he fell towards her.

“Want to go to the beach?”

At exactly the same moment that she had asked the question, and without any loss of concentration, she had turned her upper body towards Tom’s body as it fell forwards.

Multitasking. Tom had read an article on it in one of his mum’s magazines.

Tom remembered that it was at this point of no return – his body leaning towards her with one foot off the ground, his eyes closing and a hand pushing into the space between them – that the dizziness hit him.

As his body hit 40 degrees (he’d worked this out with his school protractor), his lips had come into contact with something warm, soft and tasting of bubblegum.

His eyes startled open and there right in front of him, nostril-to-nostril, was Kathy. Her eyes had been shut, which was deceptive given that from what Tom could remember her lips had been quite open.

Tom felt as if one half of him was moving at a million light years a second while the other half, mainly his legs, had been wrapped in lead or iron or something else really heavy.

Tom had had that ‘going really fast while standing really still’ feeling only once before, after standing in front of the Headmistress’s office for half an hour having forgotten to eat lunch.

It was like that feeling but really nice.

Tom distinctly remembered feeling as if someone had popped some warm pebbles into his pants: warm pebbles that had suddenly started to tumble around.

The Kiss was not the problem of course. The Scream was.

In the middle of The Kiss, it hadn’t been what shot out of her mouth and into his that was the problem. The problem had been what came out of his when it did.

At the very point of The Scream leaving his lips, Kathy’s eyes had opened, and the blue ring around them seemed to turn in a circle like a really cool gas-like flame – at which point she rocketed back at hyper-speed, far, far into the distance, smaller, smaller, smaller; only stopping when she was a whole arm’s length away.

The Kiss had been really, really nice up until then if a bit weird.

At that point both of them had sort of stumbled back from each other, beck into their own little worlds. The rest was a smudge in Tom’s head.

They did go to the beach. He did remember sitting close to her. He flip flopped from feeling OK to feeling like his head was about to pop and then wondering whether not looking at her made it too obvious that he fancied her.

The warm pebble feeling had come back to Tom quite often when he thought about the Kiss really hard.

The mere thought of The Kiss makes Tom’s breathing sound a little weird.

Tom draws his hand along the desk, flicking his pencil drumstick-like against the varnish-crusted wooden surface. Tom drops his face back on to the wood. He likes its feeling cool against his face.

He listens to the pencil-tap echo around inside his mostly empty desk, not dissimilar to the sound of his dad coming up the stairs after a quick one after work at the Golf Club with his friend who’s a member.

He looks up. The clock’s arms seem to stretch out in a big yawn and come to rest at 4.23pm precisely.

Not long now.

Surprise

The phone call had taken Michael by surprise, though he had in some ways been expected the call.

The world was a different place now since the Action: a place where the old lines, tiers, barriers, borders, snobberies and demarcations had been marched out and summarily burned in the centre of the road.

Yes, the world had turned and though some doors had closed, many others had opened: doors that would make the hearts of two people he could think of leap like children.

He had not heard that voice for twelve years. It seemed a little heavier than he remembered but he put this down to the weight of time that had passed since then.

The last time they had seen each other, the world was younger and so were they, the Boat Man or Boat Boy as he was then especially so.

They had met, covertly in a coffee shop under the arches of the old St. Pancras station, long before it became the new, glittering terminus and embarkation point of recent years.

The Action had of course forced the temple of travel to revert to its more traditional nationally minded self, given the absence of a tunnel through which to whip its beautiful shining tubular trains and no Europe on the other side for that matter to embrace them as they burst out the other side.

The cafe was a dingy little place. Condensation misted the window, souring the lights of the passing cars on the Euston road into small fizzing pools of red and yellow.

As he stepped across the threshold, the pale yellow-tiled floor seemed to tip itself towards him, the edges of its bleach-scorched tiles reaching up to the strip lights humming above his head.

The tables shone, their formica tops burnished, their patina lost, brushed bald by decades of cheap elbows furtively skating back and forth across them.

On each table sat a plump red plastic sauce container shaped like a tomato, its plastic edges bearded by unknown grazing.

Michael’s predatory senses had scrutinised the habituees of the only three occupied tables in a sweep of the eye disguised as a search for a table. Old habits.

Two of the tables were populated with haggard young bags, sipping stained brown tea with their snaggle-toothed teenage pimps, their legs finally pointing downwards after a long day in the opposite direction

The middle-aged, mustachioed man behind the counter – a Shi-ite Lebanese – judging by his physiognomy, eye and hair colour – stopped toweling the small heavy-bottomed tumblers for a moment, looking up disinterestedly, then returning to the impossible job of wiping away the millions of scourings that turned the glass to a milky white.

Ah. There you are. The man sitting at the third table was too vital to be one of the alchos or smack heads that would normally drift into the fug of one of these places: too vital and also too solid. The usual wasters developed an almost translucent look: see through: the stained and torn butterfly wings of humanity.

The young man was also the only one to look up and directly meet Michael’s eye. His gaze was steady and true. B was right. He did have eyes like oceans. Michael had always despised clichés. But on this occasion he would have to make an exception and simply bow to her greater descriptive ability.

A large calloused hand swept up across the young man’s face, its fingers tracing the line of his jaw from his ear to his chin. A nervous tick Michael thought at the time – one of the rare occasions where he had been in fact quite wrong in his reading of a physical intention.

He sat down in one measured muscular sweep, not unnoticed by the Boat Boy. Intriguing. Michael registers nothing more intensely than that which is noticed by others. Michael sensed that to survive in the world where this boy came from, you needed to be very clear about what a man might be physically and mentally capable of – and be able to respond to it in a whisper of a second.

Michael remembered the hope in the young man’s eyes at the beginning of the meeting.

He had watched the light fade slowly in painful increments, its brightness decreasing with every carefully metered sentence.B had told Michael what she wanted to say and Michael did exactly as he was told.

The undertaking of her wishes had induced a funny thought in him.

B had been so emphatic in her delivery and spoke with such clarity on the cadence and meaning of every line that, as Michael spoke her words, he could hear her voice so loudly in his head that it seemed to him that he was actually speaking in her voice.

The young man had tracked her down somehow, which was flattering – and renewed her belief in the strength of love and kindred spirits. But that this was not how it was meant to be. They had agreed – both of them – hand in hand as foaming sea was rolled up the beach in front of them by a strong So’westerly . The world was not ready for them and their dreams. The world was not kind to fractured boat boys and peculiar girls and their unexpected progeny in the small world in which she had chosen to stay.

‘The passionate fire of our intense beginning will eventually fade and the steel trap of the beige life will snap shut around us, we will cease to be extraordinary, the ‘everyday’ of our togetherness would slough up about us, suffocating, and the cord that attaches us will fray, and split, eventually snap at the end of some meaningless argument over nothing, and we will both retreat alone into the rooms of ourselves. The way the world was made right now, a life together would tear us apart. To be apart is the only way to be together’.

She had told Michael these things with great emphasis though he struggled to understand how the bright, forceful young woman he so admired had seemingly acquiesced so suddenly to such a narrow conservative view of the world more akin to that of her father and his friends.

It smacked of cowardice to Michael – cowardice in someone who he had, up until then at least, deemed extraordinary in so many ways. Something in the corner of him died at the realization.

But then he realized that perhaps the most extraordinary thing about her was that, unlike the usual renegade teenager throwing caution and clothing to the wind in pursuit of wild freedoms, B had minutely dissected her situation, her relationship with the Boat Boy and the product of that relationship soon to burst into the world – she had studied herself and deciphered with an extraordinary and naked candour that, in reality, she would never be quite extraordinary enough to pull off an action of such immensity: and subsequently decided that these life changing, world-shifting undertakings were miracles best left to others of greater intention, spirit and courage than her.

Perhaps she had realised that one far more capable of destroying the ugly inane truths of her father’s grotesque little world would come – and something more powerful would come of it – and her. The world would turn – and she and the Boat Boy would be once more.

The young man in front of him was visibly shrunk by what Michael had said to him. He seemed fixed in his seat, uncertain as to what to do. It was as if his whole emotional and physical being had never considered for one moment that his mere presence, his pursuit, would have any effect other than that of a swift dispatch to her arms and a life lived richly in love and hope with the shoeless girl with the eyes that made everything alright.

Michael’s steady silent gaze, held for what seemed like hours, had eventually filtered through to Doug.

The immovability and the inevitability of B’s decision communicated by the laser straight eyes of this Bear-like man with the vaguely school-boy flop of hair and unnervingly precise movements was clear enough.

Watching the back of the young man as he walked straight out of the café, Michael noticed a ripple run across his shoulders. It was as if the sea was far more than just some rolling strap that he trawled across endlessly in search of a living – it was if it was at work within him.

Before Doug walked out, Michael had handed him a package. In a red plastic bag too large for its contents was a box. In that box was a radio.

B had been very particular in which radio she had chosen for him. She had bought two: one for herself and one for Doug, the one small thread she was prepared to tie between them.

She promised that every night she would listen to the Shipping Forecast and hear the names of the places and spaces across the sea that he had spoken so lyrically and rhythmically of as they lay wrapped in each other.

She would listen and she would remember. And she would wait for the day the world turned.

Michael had thought her stupid. Her ridiculous idea that anything would ever change to such a degree was beyond his comprehension.

Her perceived cowardice needled at him. It could have been such a final and devastating act to unleash upon her father.

Why hadn’t she done it? Michael was too in awe of her ever to consider then that perhaps it was simply beyond what she was capable of.

He was also a romantic; a troubled one perhaps but a romantic nonetheless. The intense degree of his mawkish sentimentality was in fact equaled only in the polar opposite intensity of abject brutality that he had witnessed or had unleashed while propped up inside his uniform, under the excuse of an order to be executed.

Chapter 15.

Tom had originally planned to wander to the bus stop and day-dream his way along the 12 mile bus journey to Auntie Bea’s village, staring out of the window, his head empty bar a neon sign spinning in the dark, its flashing lights reading ‘Closed For Refurbishment’.

But his master plan of genius had been cut short by his mum turning up, toot toot tooting at the end of the school drive.

Tom walks up to the car and opens the door. He climbs in awkwardly, met by his mum’s unusually tense face and the collected, warmed smells of sweets (powdered and boiled), petrol (the cap was leaking) a particularly punchy citrus air freshener and the sticky make up smell from his mum’s lipstick.

Tom looks into the foot-well. There are crumbs and pieces of grit and dirt gathered in one corner, bunching up around a ball of fluff.

He moves the toe of his shoe up and down across the tops of the grit to make a remarkably annoying scraping noise. He draws his foot back. The action had reminded him that his school shoes are crap and the scuffs along the side prove that they are coated in some plastic stuff to make them ‘scuff proof’!

The grit speckles along the grooves in the standard inset plastic foot-well mat. He runs his heel up and down the grit until it annoys him again.

His mum seems lost in thought and is not immediately annoyed by what he is doing which is odd.

The lack of additional mats in the car was typical of his mum and her scattiness. Two weeks ago there were mats in the car. Now there weren’t. Nobody knew why. Stranger still was that no-one bothered to ask.

Tom looks sideways at his mum. The sun lights up the powdery foundation on her downy cheeks in a way that makes it look like she is glowing.

Tom thinks she is pretty. Big blocks of sunlight move across her face. They make her look really young.

He has an urge to reach out and touch her cheek. She looks at him, the light suddenly shifting behind her eyes like the sun he watches chasing clouds across the sea. He scrunches his hand, and fidgets it in his lap.

He looks down into the foot well again and shifts the ball of fluff a little further west: just to see if anything happens.

Tom takes a peek skyward. The vapour trails seemed to have calmed down recently: but maybe that is because the Captains and Navigators on the planes have figured out that the poor old Auto-Pilot is having a bit of a wrestle with things not being quite where they should be.

Tom had read in the newspaper about some big argument about autopilots and pilots and airlines that made him slightly go off the idea of flying somewhere exotic.

Having realised that some of the pilots relied a little too heavily on the autopilot to fly the plane (something to do with excessive inflight sleeping and flying in the face of an alcohol curfew 12 hours before flying), the airlines were planning to sack half of them when the Unions reappeared from the lost world they had been in for the last decade, coming out in favour of the Pilots: until that is one said pilot inadvertently parked a plane partially filled with primary school children into a tree just outside Northallerton, having just avoided even greater tragedy by hopping over the A1, skipping like a pebble across about a mile and a half of ploughed field, and jumping skyward again via the half-finished sand and gravel slip road ramp on the new by-road.

There were few injuries but a lot of angry parents – and one very noisy newspaper petition making them change their collectively unionized mind sharpish.

The car idles slowly. Traffic jam. Rubbish. Tom thinks that there is always a traffic jam when you’re in a hurry: it is compulsory.

The journey from his school to Aunt Bea’s village is lined with small nothings. Drake’s Shopping Village. The Burham Industrial Estate: ‘the home of Anglian Engineering Excellence’. And the Fudge Factory. The Fudge factory had a guided tour chaperoned by a woman with dark brown hair and cocoa powder on her hands. She was very smiley and Tom liked her. She did this mad thing with cocoa butter and paddles and they tasted chocolates at the end of it and were given some to take home.

His mother’s car snudges along, at one point pulling up alongside the bus that Tom would have been on had he taken one. Two girls sporting the almost a school uniform look are screaming and swearing from the back seat of the bus. One girl empties the remnants of a crisp bag out of the window on to the roof of a silver car.

Tom knows the girls from school. Tom looks down at his hands as he hears their attention turn to him. They shout out of the window.

“Oi loser!”

They laugh. Tom isn’t sure why they find themselves so funny.

“Oi loser, what you looking at down there?”

They screech to each other again. Tom‘s mother speaks.

“Do you know them love?”

“No”.

“They seem to know you”.

“Yeah well, I don’t”.

“They’re a bit rough aren’t they”.

“Yeah well”.

He finds himself beginning to feel like he should stick up for them, even though they are being really nasty to him. How weird is that.

The Wicked Witch of the East. His Mum looks at him, her mouth half opening and shutting, like a fish. She says nothing. He looks up: watching her closely. He is reminded of the animated Human Biology film they were shown at school on Speech & Behaviour.

He looks to see if the ‘thought’ in her mind will become brightly coloured with a face and bounce over loads of synapse things to pop smiling out of her mouth with a ta-da!

She looks at him again, her mouth eventually closing shut and she turns away. No. She had no idea how to deal with stuff like that. She could have tried though. She should try being twelve years old and a boy at his school. She should try being him – or the version of him that he thought she and his dad wanted him to be.

He slouches further into his seat. One girl, the one with mousier hair looks at him directly. They recognize each other as mutual friends of Kathy’s. They silently and invisibly make their peace: and the girl turns to someone inside the bus. A screech and caw lets Tom know that there’s a new victim in town, and they’re inside the bus somewhere.

The car radio is on. The news is packed to the brim with things that, had Tom not been the cause of them, would have been quite amazing to listen to.

They would normally have filled Tom with hope for the world because they were just different. In the last few weeks the hysteria had grown a little, fueled by programmes and newspapers pumping everyone up.

Tom had got a little nervous at one point because the man on the telly was talking about hunting down the cause of Britain floating off into the sunset (or sunrise depending which way you and it were pointing on any given day). Hunting the cause like a murderer or some bloke who’d been dodgy and who should therefore be arrested.

Tom looks out of the window and spies a Cumulus Nimbus slightly lost in the middle of the sky. He remembered it was a Cumulus Nimbus from his wall chart. Even the clouds were confused.

Britain (the definition in this instance meaning the English Scottish Welsh mainland with Cornwall knocked off and minus the Hebridean bits) had moved/sailed/floated/mooched (the verbal/adverbial definition of their passage changed depending on the journalist and circumstance) due North for a month or so at 18 Knots before veering to the left in a wide arc – its current trajectory taking it around and down the east coast of North America.

People are weird.

One report told of groups of people attending gatherings at both the English and the French ends of the channel tunnel. It was a ‘sharing thing’ apparently. In some ways they were mourning what was, like amputees who still felt the tingle and itch of limb long since departed.

The two sets of people, bought together by a separation (which was confusing in itself), agreed that it was really weird that the distance between their respective Chunnel entrances, was increasing at a rate of knots, literally.

These two points, the respective mouths of the channel tunnel were so firmly fixed in their own worlds. Nothing had changed. The distance from each of their respective homes villages and towns to their respective Tunnel entrances was no different. Same roads. Same distance. Same time to get there. It was just that ‘the other side’ was missing now: an abstract concept.

The gathered people said a lot. Sometimes nothing. What they really wanted to say to each other was that, on reflection, they missed it, the being attached bit, even though they did not know all those people who lived on the other side. They just missed them being ‘there’. A television program the other evening had shown how the two tunnel entrances had become little shrines to the departed ‘other’.

It showed a load of people walking up and down with placards and candles. And then a bearded bloke in elaborate robes had told a crowd of candle wielders that ‘the ever-increasing distance between the two fixed points of our English and the French tunnel entrances is, in a way, somewhat symbolic of the time that had elapsed and that which continues to elapse between Our Lord Jesus and Christians today’.

‘It is symbolic’ he said ‘of how a flock and their shepherd can become separated yet still be ‘as one’: fixed in our individual truths and spirituality, yet still deeply connected; both moving in our own mysterious ways: in a state of anamnesis: of living memory’ our being together as real as it ever was.

Then there was a whole bit after that about how increasing distance space and time only strengthens some connections – how time ‘is like a rope, the relationship a loose knot at its middle – pull the rope in both directions and the relationship only tightens, ever stronger.’

Tom had glazed over by then.

Any reference to ropes and knots just made him very, very nervous and he didn’t really understand what the man was talking about.

The up side was that that man in the robes had a rabbi Jewish bloke and Ayatollah Something or other from the British Muslim Society standing next to him, nodding a lot: which made a change

The breaking news about the Tunnel had begun as a ‘Leak and a crack in the Channel Tunnel EXCLUSIVE’ story – growing into an engineering flaw, which in quick succession turned into a crises that became a phenomena.

In the beginning three maintenance men on the French side on entering the works access walkway had been met by a wall of salty channel water traveling in the opposite direction. They had watched in awe, wondering what would happen once the funneling tongue of water ran itself down to a trickle.

To answer their question the tunnel’s structure promptly collapsed in front of them – a happening echoed at the English end almost to the second, tidily sealing the holes forever.

The warmth in the car around Tom was knitting itself into a fat blanket. The flat field between the car (now full of glass trapped heat) and the high blue of the sky caught Tom’s attention. He tried to pin-point the spot in the sky that hovered above the sea where the Tie stood, impassive, as the gurning, churning sea relentlessly rolled up to meet it.

For a moment he imagined a big globe turning in space, a huge peg sticking out of a little bit of the world. The Earth’s Axis. Axes? No. Axis. Or were they powers? They were powers weren’t they? Tom remembered that the word Axis in his history book meant bad things so he closed that random line of thought.

There had been riots in Northern Ireland. From what Tom could see of the archive news footage of past troubles, they loved a bit of a riot over there. The Unionists, a Protestant political party, claimed that ‘the shift is not just physical but spiritual: a desertion, a plot by the Government in Westminster to lose the whole Northern Irish problem in the slopping wake of the Island as they wander off northwards to Greenland’.

Tom remembered that the Unionists had something to do with the union between England and Scotland and some Dutch king called William who was always painted on a prancing horse. Tom sensed that it didn’t take much to see that History was not his strong point.

He turned his hand inside his pocket until he could turn it no further. His inner elbow pointed upwards now. It felt tight and began a dull ache towards hurting. They seemed quite angry, the people in Ireland. Tom’s mum had begun sighing now, and looking sideways at him in a way that made him feel weird. Auntie Bea. He really needed to get to Bea’s house.

He sighed along with his mum. Tom noticed that the man on the radio at the moment couldn’t say his r’s. They came out like ‘w’s like that bloke Jonothon Woss that his mum and dad liked.

There is a girl in Tom’s year who has the same speech thing and he kind of likes it. The radio man’s reference to a ‘pwess welease by the Fwench Govewnment that had aggwavated and inflamed Anglo-Fwench policy by pointedly announcing their pleasure at Les Anglais finally retweating in the face of a gweater Power within the Euwopean State’ ended up sounding like one of the highly un p.c. comedy sketch shows his dad watched.

Tom thought that the man with the w’s sounded a little uncomfortable; like he wanted the ‘w’s to go away. Which was sad.

The stubble ruts in the fields to the right of the dual carriageway were smoking. Twists of white puffy smoke floated upwards to suddenly stop and hang in the air suddenly with no particular intention of wafting anywhere. Thinking of which the fires in Penzance were still burning from two nights of rioting. Blimey. Rioting everywhere. He didn’t want to be someone who caused riots. Only losers and wasters rioted, or so his dad said.

Tom was 12. And from East Anglia. And he had scuff-proof school shoes. He wasn’t a rioting natural.

The riots had begun more as a celebration of the fact that the Cornish were to be ‘finally rid of the ‘foreigners’ (as the rest of the English were known).

While it was still mainly theoretical, all seemed very chirpy and friendly – the odd barricade and a lot of beer to be fair.

The right royal result came as, in floating off northwards with the rest of the country, Cornwall had snagged the southern tip of Ireland, crushing between six and eight miles of coast-line on both landmasses at the point of impact. The only victims had been one shoal of herring (numbers unknown but large), 16 surf huts, three hundred sea birds of varying breeds, two fishing boats, a number of mobile homes and one Irish couple who were up to ‘ungodly acts’ in a hut on the southern reaches of a particular cliff, though the Priest who was in the throes of witnessing said ungodly acts seemed to have got off lightly with only a broken arm and 2nd degree burns.

But the minute that Cornwall realized that it had fully detached itself to bob happily next to the Scillies in the bubbling gulf-stream, it all kicked off.

It seems that a local Bobby, one PC Peter Hudderwell, on secondment from Hatfield Police Station and suddenly feeling very isolated as he watched the other two thirds of the country sail into the distance, took severe exception to the Wicken dancing, dwarf baiting, Cider shot-gunning and general English bashing that was taking place.

He baton- charged a small group as they stood by the bus stop eating chips, each taking a well-deserved break from the general madness.

Five minutes later, with one PC Hudderwell hanging by his foot from the Wicken giant on the green, the fires began to be lit along the coastline.

As he listens to the various news pieces Tom feels exhausted by the fall out from his extraordinary action.

Tom slips his last chewing gum from the wrapper tube and rolls the foil paper in his fingers. He winds down the window to the accompaniment of a rather loud air buffeting noise. He tips his head forward as a fat load of warm air rushes up from where it had been sitting happily behind him in the car. He wonders if he stuck his head out far enough whether his cheeks would do that flappy dog cheek thing?

He flicks the paper out of the small opening and winds the window up again. Tom likes to look at the litter by the side of the road. He likes to wonder how long it’s been there. He wondered if one day he could go back to that very place and find some trace of the litter he had jettisoned out the window; a small flag to his existence, a connection to an earlier him.

Everything is connected.

There were bets being laid at the bookies as to where we’d end up. Scrunched up against the US of A? Or next stop South America? Or would we swing left again at Jamaica to turn up at our original latitude and longitude. A sort of 3 point turn if you like.

If we misread that thought Tom we might well end up plugging the hole at the mouth of the Meditteranean Sea.

Having read one particular newspaper article, Tom’s Dad had got very over excited when he heard that ‘we seem to be taking the faintest turn to the left, potentially taking the island round to the left of Greenland and directly towards his beloved America

This had left him already quietly contemplating the pros and cons of each state, on the basis of which state to move to when we were close enough to claim Citizenship.

A fat woman with bright blonde hair pictured on the right of the article had stated that we would come to a grinding halt in the middle of the Atlantic (dead in the middle of the Gulf Stream most hoped purely for sunbathing reasons) and in due time raise the flag of the new ‘Atlantis’.

She was mad.

Tom thought that people wondering where they might end up was fun. The bit that wasn’t was what seemed to happen to some people when they were done with their wondering and the novelty had worn off.

Tom was used to grown ups being just there; solid and dull and unsurprised by too much.

Since he’d untied the Tie and they’d all floated off towards a new beginning or a different end, a lot of grown-ups had begun to act strangely. Nervous. Jittery.

Tom couldn’t figure it out. But then he thought about it some more and supposed that they had always lived in a world where life was quite straightforward: sort of fixed.

You had a name, you lived somewhere, in a region of a country, in a town, a village or wherever. It was you that moved if you wanted to, not the thing you lived upon. So that was a bit hard to get used to he thought.

He realised that so many people were attached to so many things in so many ways. To their they way they spoke. To their town. To the fields opposite their house. To the shadows falling in a particular place in their bedroom at 4.30pm when they read a storybook. To the sun rising in one window and setting in another.

Something as simple as going to the supermarket actually involved a whole load of things, and times and memories, and people and places and action and noises and smells, all tied together, in some ways slightly different every time but in other ways always the same.

Tom felt like that scene in Mission Impossible where the bloke reveals loads of red tracer lines of the burglar alarm criss-crossing the big vaulted room. And Tom was in a sling hanging above it, his nose and right elbow, millimeters away from breaking the lines.

It really mattered where the sun rose and set in people’s world. It mattered to them which way was North.

Tom was also beginning to realize that it mattered even more ‘who’ was North. If they carried on as they were, North would soon be somewhere quite different thinks Tom, and South somewhere else. And the West, well, who knows where the west will turn up. The only thing certain being that it would be on the opposite side to the East.

Tom wonders where this will all lead: the floating off and the dipping and turning and people’s world being turned upside down.

He reckons that it might be towards a slightly sicky feeling and your head feeling like a big exploding melon if the time Mike and Paul tied him upside down-ish from the goalposts was anything to go by.

He had felt quite scared as he span slowly from the rope tied around one ankle. He’d never been tied upside down before and the blood rushing into all the corners of his brain made his head feel fat and stuffy. It felt like his brain had a blocked up nose.

However much he understood that his up was down and his other the wrong way around, he still felt lost and powerless. He felt really stupid because he wasn’t meant to be that way up: or down.

So perhaps he’d kind of tied everyone upside down from the goalposts. They were certainly looking a bit lost that was for sure. The man with the slightly irritating voice on the TV programme who waved his hands about all the time had said that ‘the cumulative effect of thousands of years of the interbreeding and interweaving of tribes, Ley lines, Roman roads, and expanding empires sit hunkered in pubs up and down the country wondering what will become of them’.

This seemed a little over the top to Tom and in other ways a bit hard to understand but he got the general idea.

He was in fact getting a lot of ideas from everywhere at the moment. His friend John’s dad was one of those ‘where’s. Tom hadn’t seen John properly for a week or so now.

They’d been having one of those ‘pass-you-on-the-stairs-at-school-and- say-hi-without-being-weird-or-horrid-but-its-cool-that-we’re-doing-different-stuff-see-you-round’ patches recently.

John’s dad though was popping up a lot recently. Not physically in the flesh. But on the net – he had become a bit of an event on the net.

John’s dad it turns out is a ‘Blogger’.

Which Tom thought was funny as he also went jogging which made him a Jogger Blogger or Blogger Jogger.

Tom’s a bit miffed that his dad doesn’t even know what a blog is really. Let alone be cool enough to write one. His dad had no idea what a blog was till two weeks ago.

Now it seems that if he had half a chance he’d be writing one himself. John’s dad’s blog was on a site called ‘whowherewhen.com’.

The whole website is all about how we’re connected in all these brilliant ways with all these parts of our history and the countries around us.

It also banged on a bit about the danger of leaving all of that behind, but Tom tended to ignore that bit as that was the bit he felt guilty about. The blog announced that ‘if the island swings left-hand-down and turns on its head, the Scots will become the Soft Southerners; Kent and Sussex will face the North West winds (whoops, that Kentish confidence would be going South metaphorically speaking, along with that prize-winning sunshine basking Marrow).

Tom looked across the hedge that had appeared on the right-hand side of the car, its flat tall green-ness making him feel a little claustrophobic all of a sudden.

Left-hand-down. Funny that someone should describe the instruction for the totally mad idea of a whole island changing direction like they’d describe a wheel turn while reversing into the car park at Sainsbury’s. John’s dad was very clever. He was also the one who took Tom’s dad to the golf club as a ‘guest’.

Tom’s dad had a friend called Alan who sounded a lot like Tom imagined John’s dad to be like. Maybe they were the same person. Tom had realised that he had never actually seen John’s dad, even though he popped round sometimes to pick up Tom’s dad and drive him to the Golf Club.

When Alan came around his dad tended to sit there and listen with lots of deep thinking expressions on his face, though Tom reckons that it was more to do with the fact that his dad found it hard to keep up, was really bored, or was in fact desperately trying to think up smart stuff himself.

Alan had pointed out that ‘if we turn all the way around, East Anglia will finally face up to its anthropological history both symbolically and physically, given that the Atlantic Ocean would be all that sat between the United States and the East Anglian coast, bringing the descendents of the Pilgrim Fathers on both sides of the Atlantic just that little bit closer together’. Tom remembered them from history: the Pilgrims that is. Funny bunch. Big hats.

Alan had also pointed out that the Welsh would be looking across the water at the Dutch and the Danish which would be funny: and make a welcome break from the Irish some Welsh thought, audibly, though some other people who were not Welsh, people in the Midlands specifically, thought it would serve the Welsh right for reasons no-one was able to quite figure out.

Genius Tom had thought. But strangely enough the exact same points had been made by John’s dad in his blog. Tom’s dad had looked at him in a funny way when Tom had leapt at the next available opportunity to ask Alan whether he went jogging. Especially given that the opportunity had arisen yesterday teatime just as Alan opened the Kitchen door and was mid-way through saying his usual greeting of ‘Anyone in the nuthouse’.

Tom’s dad didn’t realize that it was a clever question to trap the fake Alan who was really John’s dad into admitting that he and John’s dad were in fact one and the same.

Tom’s dad just thought Tom had finally lost it – shooting from weird awkward to plain bananas . Tom had never really thought about where we all came from til recently.

He’d certainly never thought about the things that tie people together in their own little worlds.

Tom thought that was all just brilliant. But his head hurt. He could hear the hum of billions of ropes twanging now: really, really noisy: lots of ropes connecting everyone to everything, twisting and turning and stretching and humming.

They would never be in the same configuration again, all the ropes that attached people to who they were, where they were, where they came from and where they dreamed they would be going.

All those ropes were stretched and twisted to breaking point now, the hum getting louder and louder, A deafening hum. Like when Godzilla falls onto the electricity cables, and they stretch and wine and then whiplash slash through the air, the hum broken by the odd ping and snap as one after another after another finally snapped altogether.

Part of Tom thought that was bad – very bad. And it was all his fault. But another tiny part of him thought that it might just be great. And maybe all the bad things in the world would get turned upside down and good things would appear on the surface: like the shiny worms that popped up all over the place when his dad used the big fork on the flower bed.

Maybe the United State Of Englain was not such a bad place to end up. Tom turned his head; but very, very slowly, applying his mind to the delicate and enormous job of moving a head now filled with billions of thoughts and other general amazing stuff (and of course quite a lot of weird and upsetting things too) from left to right.

The temperature in the car had become uncomfortably hot. They turned off the ring road onto the A31 something or other. The sun was now baking the side of his cheek, and it felt like there was a hot hand trying to pull his eyes shut.

It crossed Tom’s now more-than-half-baked mind that this road pointed roughly due south, and, if they were crawling along at about 14 miles an hour in its southerly direction at the same time as Britain was heading north at approximately 18 Knots, they were, in global terms, effectively standing still. In fact, if the traffic got any slower they would achieve the cosmic feat of traveling both backwards and forwards at the same time. Double Genius. Tom silently added the institution of Time Travel to his list of Super- heroic abilities.

Tom felt quite old suddenly. Having to think about what other people might feel was making his head hurt. That must be what it was like to be a grown up; to not be the only person in your life and to have to think about other people a lot – for your head to hurt a lot all the time. No wonder his mum and dad were so weird.

Time travel. Hang on? What would happen if they crossed a time zone? Black squiggles crowded up around the back of Tom’s eyes. A small phut sounded in the middle of Tom’s head. Thankfully the further they got from the beach and the closer they got to Bea’s village, the lighter Tom’s head began to feel.